The Truth (La Vérité) (2019)

Individual moments are joys in themselves - Catherine Deneuve in a leopard-skin print and Audrey Hepburn sunglasses walking her dog down a tree-lined Paris street - but add the rustle of leaves in the trees, a dance of notes on a piccolo or a tinkle of piano keys and you'll feel like you are watching a Japanese anime of impossibly beautiful, painstakingly constructed handpainted images, and like the great animated dramas of Japan - the AMSR-inducing The Wind Rises, Grave of the Fireflies, and many, any others - this latest film from Kore-eda Hirokazu skips so lightly, so gracefully though its family drama, you can thoroughly enjoy it purely on a surface-level of image and sound without stopping to think about its deeply moving themes of truth, lies, story-telling, memory, childhood, motherhood, blame and forgiveness - the truth of this multi-layered delightful dance is that you can decide what you want to hear and enjoy!

★★★★★

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The Wolfpack (2015)

Six boys and a girl raised in the confines of a NYC apartment - the eldest for fourteen of his eighteen years, apparently - are the subjects of this documentary that, at the cost of exploring myriad other fascinating lines of inquiry (criminal neglect, criminal neglect-by-proxy, urban fear, cultural isolation, personality disorder, spectrum disorder, controlling relationships, movie morality, dvd-shopping) instead focuses on the fact the boys played movie dress-ups to fill their time.

★☆☆☆☆

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About Time (2013)

Imagine Four Weddings and a Funeral with a time travel twist and you get this, an occasionally touching, occasionally funny but mostly irritating British romantic comedy slash family drama that adds time travel into the mix for no great gain, just to unnecessarily hammer home the life lessons learned by a Hugh Grant moving (backwards and) forwards through life with an Andie McDowell.

★★☆☆☆

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Boomerang (2015)

A man stirs up family tensions when he starts making inquiries into the death of his mother who died while he was young, in this French mystery and family drama filled with such likeable, warm main characters that it is impossible not to be enamoured with the mystery even as revelations move things closer and closer to melodrama.

★★★★☆

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Tokyo Story (東京物語) (Tōkyō Monogatari) (1953)

An unhurried masterpiece showcasing the minutiae of Japanese family life, Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story tells of an ageing couple's holiday to Tokyo to visit their children who they find to have grown as busy and self-interested as the burgeoning post-War city around them, and the movie is all the more devastating on account of the cheerful, uncomplaining endurance (1) of the disappointed couple.

★★★★★

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Reference:

(1) McDonald, Mark (2012-03-25). "In Japan, Lonely Deaths in Society's Margins" The New York Times.  Viewed 4 August 2015.

Captain Fantastic (2016)

A man and his too-many-to-get-to-know children whose super intellects have developed unhindered by rotisserie chickens and X-box, emerge from their lives off-the-grid to attend their mother's funeral, but their encounters with fat and poorly educated people raise questions about the father's unorthodox child-rearing techniques, in this feel-good movie so desperate to sing that in the end the kids actually do.

★★★☆☆

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