North America Best Films- Page 3 of 15

Mommy – Sexy Moms and One Uncontrollable Teenager

Mommy Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Sexy Moms + One Uncontrollable Kid = Mommy, a film with Canadian Karaoke and Violence. Sounds like a game of Cards Against Humanity right!? A smart-phone like aspect ratio takes headlines in this one in a beautifully shot film about a single mother trying to raise her unpredictably violent son.

From: Canada, North America
Watch: Trailer, Rent on Amazon, Buy on Amazon
Next: We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tangerine, Room

The Wolves (Los Lobos) – Berlinale 2020

The Wolves is a spiritual sister to Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. Instead of a boisterous white mum and daughter living in a motel by Disney World, The Wolves features a single mum with two young boys that have just crossed the border into the United States. The kids are happy to follow their mum and spend more and more days passing time in a shabby apartment on the understanding that they’re going to Disneyland.

The two boys are stuck at home everyday making their own entertainment whilst their mum works double shifts to try and create a better future. There’s no school for them to go to and they’re forbidden from leaving the apartment. Any chances of being caught and deported must be avoided.

Despite being stuck in the apartment all day, The Wolves is presented with a lot of warm nostalgia. There’s a slow and lazy guitar soundtrack that generates the same warm melancholic tones of films imbued in Americana like Mud, Bombay Beach, or even parts of Thelma and Louise. There’s also warmth in the games that the two boys play to keep themselves occupied and the drawings that come to life in their imagination. Even though the melancholic soundtrack and bleak surroundings hint that the American dream is out of reach, their playfulness shows it won’t stop them dreaming.

The Wolves is an ode to the faceless people of America. Not just the immigrants that cross the southern border seeking a better life, but the homeless, and anybody scraping together a life living below the poverty line. A few times in the film, Samuel Kishi Leopo (the director) inserts montages of portraits of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds living within the new family’s community. All the portraits feature people staring straight into the camera like you might see in a National Geographic magazine, showing them without anything to hide. It shows them purely, in front of their humble homes. What these people have in common is an absence of the white picket fenced house promised by the American dream. It’s a sign that being American, or simply being in America for those that migrate north, doesn’t automatically grant you a well spring to health and prosperity. The Wolves honestly highlights the people that the country has left behind.

For more films from the Berlin film festival, head to our Berlinale home page.

Land Of Ashes – Spain/Latin American Competition – SBIFF

In Land of Ashes, thirteen year old Selva lives in a small costal town surrounded by sea and dense forest. Her mother has passed away, so she shares the duties of looking after her frail old grandfather with Elena, an older woman who comes and goes as she wishes.

Elena is the only female role model that Selva has, but their relationship is a strange one. Selva obviously needs her for companionship and help navigating her path to adulthood, but she also despises her. She spits in her food and trades vicious insults with her over the dinner table which eventually unravels into laughs thanks to her grandfather. Later, Elena invites her dancing, but disappears soon after hitting the dance floor in order to score a few drugs and never returns. It reinforces Selva’s vulnerability and her inevitable life alone.

To keep herself company, Selva manages to conjure visions of her dead mother. These visions help to guide her through the challenges she faces, such as looking after her grandfather, and they also help her to come to terms with the impermanence of life and her future life alone. Her grandfather’s death is inevitable, but it’s not until Elena’s disappearance that she realizes that she will be living alone. Seeing her mother in the nature around her provides her with the comfort that her family will continue to live in her and her surroundings after her grandfather passes away.

Land of Ashes was one of the best films I saw at SBIFF. It creates a vivid world from just a few images of the natural world they live in – mostly of the night sky and dense jungle, but also of the local fauna. The magic in it adds some mysticism about Selva’s future alone and the life in the wilderness around us.

Right Near the Beach – Pan African Film Festival 2020

In Right Near the Beach, Jeffrey Jacobs, Jamaica’s world record breaking sprinter is beaten to death near his home. His murder sparks a frenzy of media coverage that digs into his friendship with a gay man. Jeffrey’s single father becomes a social pariah because of the reaction to his son’s death, living alone in the hills. It’s only when his youngest son returns that he is given a chance to transcend his isolation and grief.

Right Near the Beach tells its story effectively through the images and sounds it presents. Firstly, the film develops Terrence Malick’s visual style to create a more visceral feeling. Right Near the Beach still has the trademark wandering camera and meditative shots familiar to Malick’s films, but adds a varying shot length to better convey the varying emotions Jeffrey’s dad feels.

For most of the film, the average spot length feels longer than your typical Hollywood film. This gives the audience more time to watch the characters as they wander in rural Jamaica alone, allowing us to feel their search for inner peace. However, for a few key scenes, the emotional toll of the media and neighborhood gossip is too much for them and they release their frustration in sin scenes with frantically fast cutting. The quick shots that rapidly cut around Jeffrey’s dad when he starts axing a tree root creates an urgent feeling of blind rage that contrasts with the otherwise relaxed feelings generated by the longer shots. It’s one example of how the filmmakers brilliantly use shot lengths to change the feelings of each scene.

Secondly, the sound of Right Near the Beach provides the foundation for the visual experimentation. In the first half of the film, the soundtrack is dominated by a constant stream of radio show interviews with people discussing Jeffrey Jacobs’ homosexuality. The real homophobia you hear on air (these interviews were conducted with real Jamaicans) penetrates the silence of the rural area Jeffrey’s father lives. What he hears forces him deeper into isolation just to try and silence the country’s prejudice. This changes in the second half of the film, when the prejudiced voices that plague him start to ease after his youngest son’s arrival. They’re replaced by more natural sounds from the rural environment they live in, marking his successful coming to terms with his eldest son’s death. It’s as if he’s managed to meditate away the hateful media and replace it with a calm peace of mind. Just as the visceral visual style builds emotions, the sounds we hear guide us through Jeffrey’s dad’s grief.

To take the film full circle, the filmmakers end the film with the reunion of the dad and his youngest son. It’s a touching end to an emotional film that shows they have both transcended the deaths of their brother/son and mother/wife.

Right Near the Beach manages to accomplish a lot. Firstly, the editing and cinematography work incredibly well with the soundscape to depict the character’s raw emotion and path to overcoming their grief. Secondly, the full circle script gives the film a spiritual completeness that many films fail to achieve. But, that’s not all. Right Near the Beach also touches on the prejudice in Jamaica and how the country is largely overlooked internationally except for beaches and running (hence the ironic title). I’m excited to see more from these filmmakers.

Head to our Pan African Film Festival Hub for more reviews from PAFF 2020.

I Killed My Mother

I Killed My Mother Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

You haven’t heard of Xavier Dolan? He’s the young darling of the Cannes film festival, and he deserves all the praise he has got. He proves that you are never too young to start (he wrote this script when he was 16) just as Ridley Scott and Michael Haneke prove that you’re never too old to start (directing their first feature films at 40 and 47 respectively). So watch I Killed My Mother for a semi-autobiographical look at one of the brightest stars in the international film world.

Why Watch I Killed My Mother?

Watch the debut of one of the film industry’s brightest talents, Xavier Dolan. He’s only 27 year old!
For another dive into mother-son relationships (also watch his Cannes Jury Prize winner Mommy)
Just in case you didn’t think he was talented enough, Xavier also plays the protagonist in this semi-autobiographical drama
Get familiar with Francophone Canada!

The Breakdown

We love our mothers unknowingly and only realise how deep-rooted that love is at the ultimate separation.

First we see Hubert’s eyes, then his face, as he is being interviewed by the camera. He talks about his mother and says that he could be anybody’s son. A montage of fake butterflies and kitschy statues precede a slow motion shot of Hubert’s mum eating a cream cheese bagel. Hubert begrudgingly tells her to wipe some food off her face.

Next, Hubert’s mum is driving him to school. All we see is a front-on view of the two characters through the front wind-shield sitting in the front two seats. The scene proceeds as follows:

Hubert berates his mum for putting on her make-up while driving
Mum complains that Hubert never talks
Mum then turns up radio when she hears something of interest
Hubert hates the ‘news propaganda’ and shouts at her to turn it off
Mum doesn’t so Hubert puts in headphones
Mum asks why he never wants to talk any more

The first 10 minutes are a portrait of the difficulty of motherhood and the difficulty of adolescence. It is always a battle of very few words.

It is the moments away from his mother that we truly get to know Hubert. With his mother there is no sign of himself; his creativity, his homosexuality, his sophistication, and honesty. Instead, at home, stuck within his mother’s suffocating furnishing and poor fashion style, there is no room for him to be himself. This is shown when he returns home from a party on speed and urgently tells his mother that he has so much to say to her but not enough time or words to say it. In this moment we see that he wants to be understood by her, he wants to tell her everything, but he cannot. He, like many adolescents can never get back the openness of communication they had with their parents that they used to have during their childhood.

Conclusion

Xavier Dolan’s stylish debut feature is a testament of his talent (which has been justified at Cannes). Use of special features, like slow motion, montages, and intimate black and white interviews contribute to his style. He is an auteur (meaning he is a director with a distinguishable style) in a world where they are harder to come by. Do yourself a favour and check out this film, and then some more of his films (such as Mommy).