‘a-ha: The Movie’ Film Review: Modest Documentary Takes on Norwegian Pop Legends

threequel than an actual movie.And while the director has certainly pulled off some impressive action feats in the past, the staging here is often ludicrous. In one shootout scene, Alex blasts away at a chandelier, plunging the room into darkness.

“Hollywood is the ultimate dream factory … and I need dreams as much as the next man,” says Mr Molesley (Kevin Doyle) in Downton Abbey: A New Era. It’s a line that sums up the mission of the TV series’ second cinematic outing: to continue the “dream factory” tradition. And so the wishes of many a familiar character are granted over the course of two hours — along with plenty of drama.

Nick Schager Film CriticA nonfiction collage that plumbs the complicated relationship between filmmaker and subject, “Cameraperson” finds cinematographer Kirsten Johnson assembling snippets from her past works in order to evoke an assortment of intricate, uneasily resolved questions. The person behind the camera for “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Darfur Now” and “Citizenfour” (among many others), Johnson has made a decades-long career out of traveling the globe for stories that uncover hidden truths — a modus operandi reflected in her backward gaze, seeking the larger threads uniting the images and moments that continue to affect her. Without narration or a conventional storyline, it’s a uniquely insightful memoir-cum-critical-treatise that, after its Sundance premiere, should garner substantial attention from the documentary crowd.Aside from opening text that explains the diary-like nature of the project, “Cameraperson” offers little overt context regarding its intentions, instead diving headfirst into snapshot after snapshot from Johnson’s earlier films.

porn ban), I mostly used the site to connect with other Broadway nerds. Watching the Slender Man web series “Marble Hornets” alone in my bedroom was about as dark as I went.So “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” Jane Schoenbrun’s debut feature about creepypasta culture and teenage loneliness, feels a bit like looking at an alternate version of myself.

for example, a white, male film critic said he disliked “Turning Red,” a film about a Chinese teenage girl, because he found it “limiting in its scope,” I would say that that man was experiencing a personal problem, not a cinematic one. “The Goldfinch” and “Dear Evan Hansen” both bombed in large part because, unless viewers were already fans of the texts on which they were based — an 800-page novel and an unhinged Broadway musical, respectively — they were unlikely to see past both films’ inherent messiness.

th century comedians. To the filmmakers’ credit, the notion that early, silent cinema was inherently more inclusive for deaf people is a powerful point.Most of the plot points in “What?” — even the title that refers to how others often respond to Don trying to communicate — relate to the character’s difficulty to connect with the hearing majority while trying to explain misconceptions about the deaf community.

th parallel. (Apparently, the way they say “Vatican” in Quebec is hilarious if you’re from Paris.) And even though “Aline” occasionally lacks a narrative drive — in that it’s a story about a woman who pretty much got everything she ever wanted, albeit through intense hard work and sacrifice — it does score a genuinely emotional moment when Aline imagines herself having an intimate conversation with Guy-Claude after he has died.But whether you’re a fan of Dion, or a detractor, or just someone who finds her presence in pop culture to be fascinating, “Aline” is such a singularly eccentric and sui generis piece of entertainment that it demands to be seen and discussed and pondered.