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If you’re a fan of coming of age films centered around trouble seeking kids, you’ll find a lot of familiar ground in Boy on the Bridge. Set within a now sleepy mediterranean town, 12 year old Socrates forces the community to reckon with secrets in a way that the police and town leaders cannot.
Boy on the Bridge starts with two 12 year old boys setting off home made firecrackers in the middle of the street to surprise a drunk man as he walks out of his house. The noise they create alerts the local police chief, setting up a bike chase through the town. Socrates, the troublemaking kid, escapes through the forest to the home of an old war vet. His stories of the war, and willingness to give young Socrates advice to advance his bomb-making, makes him one of his role models in the film.
His other role model, his respectable dad, generously forgives him for his trouble-making. He’s positioned as the benevolent character in this film through his role as community mediator (as seen in a scene in which he gathers community leaders to confront a domestic violence incident), his leniency with Socrates, and his position as a doctor (an always respectable occupation). However, his benevolent character is a front to disguise the secrets he keeps from his family, which inevitably, the curious Socrates uncovers. His secrets, not his benevolence, are shown to be what binds the community together.
Like other films that feature boys getting into trouble, Boy on the Bridge shows that trouble often leads to discovering hidden secrets. Whilst the secrets that Socrates uncovers are less fantastic than the hidden treasure in The Goonies, its humble community murder mystery make it an engaging enough watch.
Or if you’re looking for more films focusing on community in small towns on the Mediterranean, try The Black Pin from Montenegro and Simshar from Malta.
Adrian Lam enters the scene with a sultry sense of calm arrogance, set at the peak of his professional power, circa 2002. Over the course of two hours, his righteousness is challenged, stripped down and laid bare over the negligence of a system that he’s taken rigorous advantage of. A case goes majestically haywire, resulting in Adrian and his cohorts sending an innocent woman off to potential life imprisonment, done unto themselves for a lack of attention, research & forethought.
A Guilty Conscience is a play on fairness, deliberately weaving around the audience’s expectations to showcase a literal conscience at odds ends with its own guilt. Played with strong, dynamic robust by Dayo Wong, Adrian is a regulator of rule-setting who doesn’t greatly accept the logic of the all-too-human scenarios he finds himself in – even beyond the courtroom. The logic strewn through exterior scenes of his friends, providing gambling advice and tradesmanship, seem more willingly appealing than sound or safeguarded.
Like any courtroom show, A Guilty Conscience plays lightly with the effect of those performing outside the emotional structure of goodness. The one who lives with regret, the one facing him, the one juror skeptical of a willing innocence – all factors in a play of one locked from the musical of many. Guilt rides not only alongside our one central person, but on the coattails of the actions we perform, the people we meet, the onlookers of our unimpeded recourse on this ground.
By third act, the trauma show becomes more intimate, casting Adrian in not just a brighter light, but truly any light at all. Once cast into the unknown, direct ties are frequently made to show Adrian’s evolution – making fun of someone’s diet, inhabiting those foods for purchase on a casual day years later. His interactions with every character evolves Adrian in chemistry & screen presence – not bigger, but with more studiousness (or lack thereof) for what they all represent, a holy-coming of justice in the form of moral understanding. Adrian’s legal colleague Evelyn (Renci Yeung) is named after British Marshall Evelyn Wood, and reflects her own set of conscious rules from the onset, paralleling the two in common routine.
A Guilty Conscience is a bit too long, stuffed with theatrical dramatics stepping into the doldrums of a real trial. It does not do a lot to tackle the greater wealth power implications it sets out beyond narrative fuel. What it does contain is an incredibly intriguing case, paced out with baffling levels of subtlety, that lead with utmost concentration to an obvious conclusion.
Adrian eventually learns to let the punches land, rather than speculate where they will go – taking control of his own destiny for once. What his future lacks in surprise or suspense, it makes up for in a message of fairness to the communal present, a treatise against the influential powers of wealth and resource that plays stage-like over a well-reason constitutional drama, emotional and gratifying all the same.
Seen at AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Monterey Park
Watching the 2023 Oscar shorts is the quickest and easiest way to get closer to watching all of the Oscar contenders. So if you’re looking for something to say about the Academy Awards this week, check these short films out at cinemas near you.
The Animated 2023 Oscar Shorts
An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It (Australia)
Neil (Pendragon himself) works at a computer doing… something. He finds himself on the daily commute to his office from… somewhere. There’s always a deadline and schedule to meet at the corporation of… mysterious account. Luckily, Neil finds therapeutic understanding in an office ostrich (John Cavanagh), who reveals to him much of what the audience already understands: the fourth wall is what keeps Neil from his destiny, a life unfettered from the benign banality of… some such.
The strangest among the crop of this year’s nominees—usually a feat within itself, but here even more so—An Ostrich colludes camera trickery and unexplained plot thickening to the benefit of anyone wondering how stop motion became so relevant in today’s industry again. Pendragon maintains his win for the Australian Student Academy Award for the short, a sign of creative breakthrough, if not some trust from a system ready to hold their faith above the absurd. For his inventive framing and perceptions, further recognition for Pendragon wouldn’t be unwarranted. -ST
Ice Merchants (Portugal)
Doing more with silence than the rest of this year’s dialogue-minimal shorts combined, Gonzalez’s artistic depiction of father-son relationships at their brink is a tragedy bred from circumstances beyond our comprehension. Curiously isolated from their matriarch, the two undergo a baffling daily routine: freezing water from atop their lofty cliffside home, plummeting down to merchandise in the valley town below, and steadily making their way back up for supper and sleep. This goes on until powers beyond their own force a spontaneous break from habit.
Gonzalez won this year’s Annie Award for Best Short Subject, a notice of interest to the Academy’s voters as beneficial as any. Ice Merchants will go down with or without the Oscar as one of the most lauded short films in the program’s history, running the festival circuit mercilessly from a deliriously colorful skypoint. Yet the short, more clever than it ever leads its hand with, emotionally seals a justified landing even when all seems lost; maybe it could do so on Oscar night just the same. -ST
My Year of Dicks (U.S.)
Screenwriter Pamela Ribon, noted for her work on Moana and Ralph Breaks the Internet, recounts a tumultuous time of her youth growing up in 1990s Houston. As the title implies, Pam (Brie Tilton) has to go through the shapes, shades, warts and wont’s of securing an appointment to lose her virginity at age 15. Nearly everything that can comedically go wrong does, along with the sprinklings of interactions with the worst vibe checks boys of the Gen X era can muster.
Like the teenage transition to womanhood, My Year of Dicks is, at times, appropriately excruciating. Originally conceived for episodic broadcast on FX, Gunnarsdóttir mixes visual styles not unlike an experimental web series would, drawing from anime and Adult Swim alike. My Year of Dicks, humorously landing its place in Oscar history by name alone, won’t receive more appreciation than it already commands – but a cute story, wrapped tightly in a bow near invisible in the making, goes a long way when the promised entertainment is begotten by just the sheer mention of, ahem, “Dicks.” -ST
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (U.K.)
Starting from the beginning, a boy (Jude Coward Nicoll) and a mole (Tom Hollander) find solace in each other’s company – snow encasing anything they know familiar, stuck in the outside to look for simple comforts. From there joins an untame fox and a curiously mythical horse. Slowly, by biblical pace more so than by weariness, the boy and his growing cohort of creatures set off to discover a home they seem to know nothing about, acknowledging their victory sign may be no clearer than their starting post, dashed and covered in a layer of snowed-out ambiguity.
Based on Mackesy’s own children’s book illustrations, the Apple TV+ short submission goes a long way for voters simply judging by its cover alone. Evoking the charismatic comforts of Winnie the Pooh better the most animated products of the last half century, Baynton and Mackesy find established ground in weening all the self-important hagiographic sayings they can out of the playbook, a 32-minute short denser on morality principles than animal tendencies. If that sounds outside the banner of trustworthy quality, then you’ve found yourself outside the voting body, which lauded the film heavily at this year’s Annie Awards for frontrunning commendation. -ST
The Flying Sailor (Canada)
Animation is far from the only field in which the incomprehensible can be submitted as fact, but it certainly is one of the more audacious options. In the collision of 2D and 3D effects, a story is brought forth a century later – the impact of two fully-barged shipping vessels in Halifax 1917 that caused an impromptu explosion so large, it defied physics and deductive reasoning. A lone sailor, sent coursing miles into the sky, landed near naked, bodily, fully intact in a neighboring district.
For all its duration spent in the heavens above Nova Scotia, The Flying Sailor is capriciously shallow, a work of blanketed humor that singes one of the most traumatic events in recorded Canadian history down to a portly man, flailing nude with exposed penis, silhouetting overhead an endless mass of clouded smoke. It truly does not get more symbolic or understated than that – and so there is little else to note. -ST
The Documentary 2023 Oscar Shorts
Haulout (U.K.)
In this year’s requisite piece of climate change pleading, the siblings Arbugaev film scientist Maxim Chakilev on his journey through the Russian arctic, treading along sheets of ice and terrain in search of the titular ‘haulout’ – a rare, though predictable phenomenon months in the making that roots all of Maxim’s biological studies in a habitat changing before his eyes.
What appears at first to be the account of a northern hermit eventually reveals itself to be a very surreal account of elder traditions continuing in an ecosystem that may not allow them for much longer. Haulout hinges on the reveal of its premise, a uniquely-played shift in tone so sudden it borders on outrageously funny. The surprise is the documentary’s key element – in today’s world, so much scientific warning can only warrant so much shock at the incitement of worsening conditions, even at the furthest reaches of what one could mistake for civilization. ‘They’ don’t seem to happy about the sudden shift of things either… -ST
How Do You Measure a Year (U.S.)
From ages two through 18, experimental filmmaker Rosenblatt films his daughter on the same couch, with the same medium-close camera angle, asking her a script of half-broadstroke, half-maudlin questions concerning personal life, existentialist ideas, future aspirations and youthful tendencies. How Do You Measure a Year? takes a “Rent” quote and uses it to capitalize on an idea any parent would find fun and engaging – to reject nihilism by means of documenting their child’s mental state in real time, a project born out of either a hyperfixed, uncool philosophy, or boredom. One assumes with this filmmaker it’s the former.
Rosenblatt was here last year with one of the most intrepidly thickheaded Oscar shorts in recent memory, When We Were Bullies. His follow-up release doesn’t carry nearly the same broken stigma of a man who can’t read what he’s putting on paper, though it does leave one to wonder why such nuttiness continues unabated. For every incredibly useless question Rosenblatt posits (asking his toddler about societal power), the value of How Do You Measure a Year? seems to come back around, ending on a sentimental going-away note that Rosenblatt surely didn’t predict – for he can’t see the future even half as well as his daughter can evoke the values of the present. -ST
Stranger at the Gate (U.S.)
Seftel takes a camera to Mac McKinney, a war veteran framed as the epitome of anti-terrorism succumbing to his own demons. A former U.S. Marine, Mac details the internal horrors the foreign battlefront left him with, a relentless need to silence the residents of a local mosque, people for which he can see no other face besides the ones the American government has taught him to hate for chapters of his familial growth and defensive experience.
Stranger at the Gate may be among the most controversial of this year’s short film entries, for nothing more than its indecisive carefree inhabitance of ‘we-are-the-world’ hand-holding. Mac McKinney, a burly figure with tattoos aplenty, is given incredible narrative force to speak his mind, often with confounding truthfulness. This is the story of a soldier’s settling moments with his own consciousness, and not so much a lament of the systems that got him there. Where religious freedoms care to spread, Stranger at the Gate is not an assurance that local communities are really following. -ST
The Elephant Whisperers (India)
Bomman and Belli are a loving couple who hold a heralded status in South India, recognized for their skillful tract and familiarity with local wildlife, exotic and unbecoming as they emerge. The Elephant Whisperers focuses on their relationship with one particular orphan Raghu, a curious boy of assumed intelligence who grows resiliently under their protective care. Whether Raghu establishes lived-in roots as one of his own kind is another question, Bomman and Belli taking it upon themselves to prove an ecological service unheard of to their indigenous communities.
The Elephant Whisperers benefits from its cinematography more than anything, decorated production value relayed in the capturing of effervescent colors, splendid close-ups of the childlike mammals in the reserve, guiding a perspective that comes across as more relatable and illuminating to the relationship of pet and owner than Hollywood has been capable of recreating in years past. Don’t let the Netflix-branding fool you from Gonsalves’ cinematic depiction of comforting sensibility, a brokered chronicle of man and animal that alleviates much worry that this year’s documentary field will emotionally overwhelm more than it will sympathize and engross. -ST
The Martha Mitchell Effect (U.S.)
The wife of John Mitchell, the Attorney General and campaign manager for President Richard Nixon, would never tolerate being so simply referred to as just ‘the wife of an Attorney General.’ Martha held esteem through her incredibly vocal appearances, on the press cycles and the talk show circuit alike, speaking her mind aligned to the Republican majority only in shucked responsibility. For Martha was a stronger tabloid than Nixon could even control, embedding herself into the Watergate scandal for better or worse, a woman whose job was never to keep the peace when such unscrupulous leaders were present.
Netflix’s The Martha Mitchell Effect could very easily be mistaken for a network TV expose, if not for the documentary’s consistently enamored takes of Martha’s visage. What Alvergue & McClutchy’s short lacks in political treatise toward anything that couldn’t be found in the most listened-to Spotify podcasts, it mostly accounts for by keeping Martha front-and-center, a figure of emotional and understandable stock, who fought for her beliefs in spite of a politically-dealt decade that would consistently let her down. Whistleblowers have been recounted with more inspiration in recent years, but one could do worse for stories of emblazoned righteousness. -ST
The Live Action 2023 Oscar Shorts
An Irish Goodbye (Ireland)
Following the untimely death of their mother, a young man with Down syndrome and his estranged brother discover her unfulfilled bucket list.
Maybe this will be helped by all the voters who liked Banshees of Inisherin, but not enough to rank it in their first few spots. An Irish Goodbye, has a lot of fecks, moaning, and dry humor. It also has two more great Irish names in Turlough and Lorcan – ironic considering it was directed by a Tom and a Ross. However, despite it’s attempt to balance dark humor and warm feelings, it ends up a bit too saccharine. – RS
Ivalu (Denmark)
Ivalu is gone. Her little sister is desperate to find her and her father does not care. The vast Greenlandic nature holds secrets. Where is Ivalu?
Interestingly, Ivalu is co-directed the director behind Greenland’s first feature film directed by a woman, Anori, which we’ve previously reviewed for FilmRoot. Ivalu also contains a mystery enhanced by the harsh but beautiful Greenlandic landscape. However, it also carries some of Anori‘s flaws – the flashbacks of Ivalu cut with snippets of her sister searching for her, never build up enough suspense for the predictable pay-off. -RS
Le Pupille (Italy, U.S.)
Le Pupille brings you into a Catholic Orphanage during Christmas in the height of the Second World War. Despite the frugal times and strict Mother Superior, the girls find joy in a few magical scenes reminiscent of the wonder of early cinema.
In the Catholic Orphanage, objects are a scarcity. Unlike the often stuffy materialism of today’s modern world, the girls in Le Pupille live in large rooms with very few things around them. The frugality in front of the camera is also seen in the film’s production. Le Pupille was shot completely on film, and therefore all of the special effects are completely VFX free. This gives the film a playful magic that feels like the wonder of the Melies’ silent films. In one scene a baby appears out of thin air (from one shot to the next), whilst a freeze-framed shouting Mother Superior conveys shock from what feels like the kids perspective in another. It’s this simplicity both in front of the camera (with the limited objects and distractions) and behind the camera (in the production process) that makes this short Christmas film feel playful. -RS
Night Ride (Norway)
Night Ride is another Christmas short (I guess Academy members binge their shorts over the Holiday season). It’s premise is mildly amusing: Ebba unwittingly hi-jacks a tram and decides to play out the role of tram driver. However, it quickly takes a very un-festive turn. Just as we’re enjoying some laid back humor, a trans-woman is assaulted right under our noses. Then in an uncomfortable 180, our lead character becomes a ‘hero’ for ‘identifying’ with the assaulted woman.
It’s a shame, because Night Ride starts off pretty humorously. It could have been an enjoyable festive short, but instead chose to use transphobia as a tool to develop the character of the cisgender lead. -RS
The Red Suitcase (Luxembourg)
A veiled 16 year old Iranian teenager is terrified to take her red suitcase from the carousel at the Luxembourg Airport for fear of being identified by her fiancé. Her fear grows with every second in the face of what awaits her beyond the gate.
Like Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye (last year’s winner), Cyrus Neshvad’s The Red Suitcase does a great job of plunging you into a situation and ramping up the tension quickly. It’s not initially clear what the girl is afraid of. The film doesn’t waste time telling you who she is, where she is, or where she’s come from. Instead we learn bits about her through the action. It’s pure chase-thriller and has no excess in its tight 17 minute run time. -RS
More so than the mystery of where Huang Yu-Xuan (Ko Chia-Yen) and Wang Quan-Sheng (Hsu Kuang-Han) have gone—where their spirits have bounded off too, whom takes the place of which body and how they return—is the mystery of how Someday or One Day, an adaptation of the hit Taiwanese television drama, went so terribly south. Primary director of the original Tien Jen Huang returns here to create a baffling story of dualities reflected against identical-looking dualities, an improbable mess that only rides so far on cute delicacy before the tape unwinds entirely.
At first, things seem steady, though speedy. A wistful camera wanders over pristine decorative interiors like a gift shop, so much of the plot to come only teased through low-budget VFX snapshots. Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan, having met-cute at record pace, are two entities who spend most of their time longingly sighing and staring out into the distance, their vague young adult concerns very present, though indecipherable. Teens at odds with their singularity, so commonplace in the drama of modern Chinese media, cannot just be scanned for relatability – something needs to be presented to the viewer, clearly.
And so enters the plot of Someday or One Day – shocked from the sudden death of Quan-Sheng, Yu-Hsuan spends her years daydreaming away from society, stuck in her own head, before waking up years later in the body of a mutual friend Chen Yun-Ru (also Ko playing a double role) years prior before her love’s demise. Yun-Ru finds herself in the most complicated role perceivable, forced to convince her friends from their past of their oncoming danger, barely able to articulate the hell she’s been pacing through ever since.
To Ko and Hsu’s credit, nothing about their performances here drag, the success of their well-established chemistry is the only real ingredient to make the movie’s breakthrough romantic first kiss come close to operating. Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan relate through their favorite couple song, lifted from the TV series; they incur the abusive collateral of time spent together equal to time spent apart. If everything seems trivially, tonally normal in their lives, maybe it’s because it should be, for the most part.
The most interesting thing at play with Someday, as with a lot of Chinese rom-coms in this vein, is the relationship of everyday individuals to their romantic fate: if it’s coincidence that brought us together, is it coincidence that is keeping us together? Altogether, not a bad question that “Someday asks directly at least once. Huang even guides us to a different existential question: are dreams the barrier to our happiness? The normalcy of a relationship growing into, outward and apart can and has been subject to a more inspective eye than this hundreds of times, on better and easier to ascertain platforms.
The original TV series, spanning 13 episodes that dive deeper into the sinister mystery behind Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan’s body bouncing history and conundrum, gained acclaim for its nourishing continuum, a collective audience experience that intertwines pop tendencies and true-hearted romance. How this film adaptation, branded neither specifically as a sequel nor a creative reboot, functions parallel to that is beyond comprehension.
Seen at AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Monterey Park
Adam is the son of a fisherman from Manzala. Played in a state of overwhelming control by Tawfeek Barhom, Adam is a man caught up in the enforcement of parties, privilege and power beyond his own. He studies now at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, a prestigious kingdom of knowledge disparate from his hometown. In his attempts to conform to such a foreign class, Adam will be forced to break away from where he comes from, where he fits in, and what he is.
Barhom conceives Adam with a drowned-out regularity – the world spinning in front of his glazed look, eyes sunken into his rapidly outpaced mind, initially unclear whether this same mind can handle what director Talik Saleh presents as a complex relationship with his father and loved ones. Slowly, a more mysterious mind unravels itself. Adam becomes integral in the election of the University’s Grand Imam, a powerful religious position, that prompts the region’s officials to scrape together what unruly coup-like plots they can muster.
Two key aspects of Cairo Conspiracy lend it strength where the common eye doesn’t see: Roger Rosenberg’s production design examines a colorful swath of royal colors and ambers that take the film out of time, a growing modernity only revealing itself once outside the religious confines of Al-Azhar; and Theis Schmidt’s editing, a frenetic cut that often deletes the bookending pause of a common conversation, depositing the audience mid-instruction. Both lend Saleh the ability to curve his story away from an objective viewpoint, each religious and political sentiment a targeted draw within the limits of only what we’ve been allowed to behold.
The evolution of Adam’s character lends Cairo Conspiracy its most comprehensive themes, circling around the identity of oneself within the ever-splitting world we spend our educational years breaching toward. Though Saleh, no stranger to conspiratorial plotlines and investigative contention, allows hyperbole to sink into his resolutions, his lead’s transformation is deftly carried on bended shoulders by Barhom. A wisdom and judgment fills his intent and mind through the ongoing recourse, filling the gaps with the same likened modernity.
Where identity favors not oneself, outside eyes strengthen their stance. For Adam is often just a fisherman himself – or the son of a fisherman, depending on who you ask. In the face of God, over country, the distinction may finally grow some significance.
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