‘A House Made of Splinters’ Review: A Heart-Tugging Documentary Portrait of Children in Limbo

Guy Lodge Film CriticFor many of us, the first mental image prompted by the name Karen Blixen is of a radiant Meryl Streep, resplendent in oatmeal linen and undulating safari hat, romantically lit in the tawny Kenyan dusk. If you wish that to remain the case, best to steer clear of “The Pact” — not that Bille August’s flat, unflattering portrait of the older Blixen should be appointment viewing for anyone.

A number of films have been nominated for International Film (previously known as Foreign Film) and Documentary Feature, but none have earned nods in those categories and Animated Feature. That is until today when Jonas Poher Rasmussen pulled off that remarkable feet with “Flee.” Denmark’s submission to the Academy Awards is also the first documentary to earn an Animated Feature nomination in the 20 year history of the award.

Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Neon film Flee made history this morning, as it became the first ever to score a trifecta of Oscar nominations in the categories of Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film.

Andrea Bocelli in 2018, Matteo Bocelli has finally gone solo. After covering Can You Feel The Love Tonight? accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for the Disney Goes Classical album, the 24-year-old released his debut single aptly called Solo. Just a few weeks ago he launched a follow up in Close, which has already seen its music video garnered over one million views.

Most kids wouldn’t want to endure high school twice, although there are some who would no doubt prefer to remain there forever. Brandon Lee (no, not the late actor son of Bruce Lee) chose a third path by re-enrolling when he was 32 years old and getting away with it, at least for a while. How it all happened is whimsically recounted in My Old School, a clever, amusing and rather slight account of a Scottish misfit’s most irregular education. Or, as Woody Allen used to describe himself, it’s “thin but fun.”

Ben Whishaw, the star of the BBC/AMC’s upcoming This Is Going to Hurt adaptation, was attracted to the medical drama due to it being “a love letter to the NHS.”

When the Oscar nominations are announced on Feb. 8 Flee could pull off an unprecedented trifecta—becoming the first film nominated as Best Documentary Feature, Best International Film and Best Animated Feature.

Terrified women and children are looking for places to hide from bombs. Suitcases are being filled with belongings for a quick getaway as men take up arms to defend Ukraine.

Guy Lodge Film CriticPersonal and political turmoil face a serene camera in “Klondike,” a vision of the ongoing war in Donbass war that brooks no compromise in depicting the severe impact of the conflict on the region’s civilians — in particular, the innocent women to whom the film is dedicated. Ukrainian writer-director Maryna Er Gorbach largely assumes the viewpoint of a heavily pregnant farmstead owner as her life and home quite literally fall apart on July 17, 2014, the day a Malaysia Airlines passenger flight was shot down over Donbass, killing nearly 300 people.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIt’s always a kick to encounter a documentary about a subject after you’ve seen the deluxe scripted and acted Hollywood version. “Lucy and Desi,” Amy Poehler’s film about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz — their love, their showbiz partnership, their revolutionary influence on the creative landscape of television, their meshing and clashing spirits — is a nimble and fascinating documentary.

Is the drama heating up? As filming continues for Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Garcelle Beauvais and Sutton Stracke seemingly made it clear that they aren’t on good terms with Erika Jayne.

Michael Nordine authorThe former Jaime Lannister is a different kind of ruthless in “A Taste of Hunger,” a foodie film whose protagonist’s ambition is summarized by the opening epigraph: “If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you I want everything.” Everything, in this case, is the restaurant world’s crowning achievement: a Michelin star, which since 1926 has designated the best of the best around the world. Only 2,817 eateries have been so honored, and director Christoffer Boe’s drama focuses on a restaurateur’s quest to become the 2,818th.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticThere’s an extraordinary scene in the middle of “Navalny,” a must-watch documentary that tells the inspiring, scary, and profoundly important story of Alexei Navalny, the vitally popular Russian opposition leader who, as a presidential candidate, became such a threat to Vladimir Putin that the Kremlin tried to poison him. Most of the documentary, which was unveiled as a last-minute “surprise” entry in the U.S.

JD Linville On the Eastern border of Ukraine in the Donbas region is the city of Lysychansk, only 90 kilometers from Lugansk, where along the bank of the Donets lies the Lysychansk Center for the Social and Psychological Rehabilitation of Children.This halfway house serves as a momentary intervention for neglected and at-risk children while the state decides where to place them. It is there that director Simon Lereng Wimont, who was shortlisted for an Oscar with his last film “The Distant Barking of Dogs,” filmed his new documentary “A House Made of Splinters” which will world premiere at Sundance in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.Cinephil is handling world sales for the film.

British embassy staff and their dependants are being pulled out of the Ukranian capital, Kyiv, amid mounting fears of a Russian invasion.

almost – to make up for the fact that the story itself is something of a letdown.A classic unreliable-narrator doc, the film is always fun to watch. But unlike, say, Ramin Bahrani’s “2nd Chance” — a 2022 Sundance doc that is intricately constructed to take the viewer through the twists and evasions doled out by its own unreliable narrator — “My Old School” works hard to put a stylish spin on a story whose surprises are telegraphed from the beginning.It gets off to a promising start, as we see actor Alan Cumming sitting down at a desk in a Scottish classroom, with titles letting us in on the film’s central conceit: “The man at the heart of this story does not want to show his face, but you will hear his voice.

EA has removed the community-created zombie survival mode from Battlefield 2042 due to issues with XP farming.The change was confirmed by Ripple Effect Studios (formerly DICE LA) senior design director Justin Wiebe on Twitter, who said the mode had an issue with “standard game progression.”​​”We’ve removed the Zombies mode and replaced it with Gun Game,” wrote Wiebe. “Hopefully we can fix it in the future and keep it in alignment with standard game progression.

Apparently it is the season to celebrate the iconic marriage and professional relationship of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed a penetrating, funny, revealing, and ultimately moving film, Being The Ricardos which covers a lot of ground in the Lucy/Desi world using dramatic license to place several real events in their lives all in the course of one week of production on I Love Lucy. Although starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem as the iconic pair, it felt quite real and actually was as you discover watching Amy Poehler’s marvelous love letter to their lives and times in Lucy And Desi, which like Ricardos will be available on Amazon Prime, the perfect companion piece to Sorkin’s film, and a compelling documentary portrait all on its own.

Seemingly a rejection of monocausal history in that it twists the firehose nozzle all the way open to spray from any and every direction, “Riotsville, U.S.A.” is no less problematic from where it sits on the other side of that theoretical chasm. Grabbing at anything that conforms to the half-cooked epiphanies the documentary has from moment to moment, the path of the film’s discussion weaves through about a dozen provocative ideas without betraying much of an attempt to critically analyze any one of them.