‘In Her Hands’ Film Review: Doc Takes a Tense But Shallow Look at Afghanistan’s Youngest Female Mayor

Addie Morfoot Contributor “In Her Hands,” a Netflix documentary produced by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, has won the 18th Camden Intl. Film Festival’s audience award. While the in-person component of the Maine-based festival ended on Sept.

the departure of American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, chaos, fear and rampant violence has ruled the country, said Roberts, the director of “Escape From Kabul,” a new documentary chronicling the harrowing exodus premiering Wednesday on HBO Max.Armed raids are only the beginning of everyday terrors under Taliban rule now faced by Afghanistan citizens — including American allies unable to flee.“You’ll see it on the street, [the Taliban] have complete control and they’re hardliners. So people follow their rules and if they don’t, then you get beaten, or you get put in prison, or you don’t really know, because the rules aren’t really set yet … there were people getting shot at checkpoints,” he added.

Jamie Roberts’ terse, painfully precise documentary “Escape from Kabul” zooms right in on one episode—the massive last-minute airlift of Afghans and remaining American personnel from Kabul in August 2021—and never looks away, even when you might wish that it did. It’s a close-quarters kind of war film that moves in tight and leaves little room to breathe.

The Santa Fe International Film Festival (SFiFF) has announced its first 15 feature titles. These films are part of the Special Presentation section and will be followed by a full schedule of competition films, short films, panels and events. SFiFF starts October 19 and will run through October 23.

An exceptional and, one might venture, unprecedented group of politicians, diplomats, policy wonks, elected officials and veteran Washington insiders expound on the effectiveness of international military intervention—and the lack thereof—in The Corridors of Power. Israeli director Dror Moreh made one of the great political documentaries of recent times in The Gatekeepers (2012), as well as the excellent The Human Factor (2019), and this time he has assembled an all-star cast of more than 30 political heavyweights including Henry Kissinger, Hilary Clinton, George Shultz, Madeleine Albright and Condoleeza Rice, who in deep, original interviews, help to build a picture of how and why the best intentions can come unglued. The film deserves to be seen in any and all venues by audiences interested in the state of the world and clarity about how we got here.

could he? And even if he can sign on with a freighter taking cargo to Southeast Asia, what can he do when he gets to Saigon?He embarks on the trip at least partly because nobody he knows thinks he’ll actually do it, and he bumbles his way around Vietnam with a bag full of beer that dispenses so many cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon it starts to feel like a cross between a clown car and Jesus’s loaves and fishes. (Chickie and his pals, Catholics all, would either appreciate or be offended by the Jesus comparison.)The point of the movie, of course, is what Chickie learns in Vietnam — that it’s a quagmire, that the good guys and bad guys aren’t as clear-cut as they might have seemed back at the bar, and that Americans are being lied to about what’s happening by their government. But to learn his lessons, he’s got to find his way around a good chunk of Vietnam, hitching rides on military helicopters because the top brass figures that he must be CIA, since a civilian can’t really be wandering around in country.

A few minutes before the North American premiere of “Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom,” director Evgeny Afineesvky summed up his state of mind in a single word: “exhausted.”That makes sense, because “Freedom on Fire” screened at the Toronto International Film Festival about six months after Afineevsky and his team began working on it, barely more than a month after its final footage was filmed and only a few weeks after Helen Mirren recorded narration for a scene that comes early in the documentary.For Afineevsky, who landed Oscar and Emmy nominations for 2015’s “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom,” this sequel of sorts was made in a six-month rush, including just three months of editing after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February of this year. “The urgency of the movie,” the Russian-born director told the audience before the Tuesday morning TIFF screening, “is to not neglect the situation right now.”Certainly, urgency is a hallmark of “Freedom on Fire,” a harrowing document shot by dozens of people inside Ukrainian cities as the Russian army conducted a bombing campaign and an invasion that seemingly targeted civilians, despite Vladimir Putin’s claims that Russia was there to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the country, and to somehow “free” it – though as more than one person in the film points out, the Russian offensive has resulted in ordinary citizens being freed from their lives, their homes, their families.The director’s first film about Ukraine, “Winter on Fire,” was an on-the-ground look at the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising, in which student protests against the Russian-backed president drew a brutal response but resulted in the removal of the president.

attended the premiere of her upcoming film Causeway at the Toronto International Film Festival wearing a stunning off-the-shoulder Dior Haute Couture dress with a corset-inspired bodice. Lawrence wore the sheer, long-sleeved gown over a pair of high-waisted black briefs and topped off the look with a pair of emerald and diamond Kwiat earrings and strappy black sandals. Similar to her from recent months, Lawrence wore her beachy blonde hair down and swept to the side and kept her makeup look fresh with glowy skin and a classic nude lip. US actress Jennifer Lawrence arrives for the premiere of Causeway during the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, Canada, on September 10, 2022. Causeway is a psychological drama starring Jennifer Lawrence as a US soldier recovering from a traumatic brain injury while deployed in Afghanistan. This marks Lawrence's first film premiere in 2022, as well as her first major public appearance since welcoming her first child with husband earlier this year.In a new published in September, the Causeway star revealed that her son's name is Cy and about meeting her baby boy.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic No director has done more to deconstruct the myth of the suburban American family than Steven Spielberg. Dissertations have been written and documentaries made on the subject. And now, at the spry young age of 75, Spielberg himself weighs in on where his preoccupations come from in “The Fabelmans,” a personal account of his upbringing that feels like listening to two and a half hours’ worth of well-polished cocktail-party anecdotes, only better, since he’s gone to the trouble of staging them all for our benefit. Spielberg’s a born storyteller, and these are arguably his most precious stories. From the first movie he saw (“The Greatest Show on Earth”) to memories of meeting filmmaker John Ford on the Paramount lot, this endearing, broadly appealing account of how Spielberg was smitten by the medium — and why the prodigy nearly abandoned picture-making before his career even started — holds the keys to so much of the master’s filmography. More similar to Woody Allen’s autobiographical “Radio Days” than it is to European art films such as “The 400 Blows” and “Amistad” (the more highbrow models other directors typically point to when re-creating their childhoods), “The Fabelmans” invites audiences into the home and headspace of the world’s most beloved living director, an oddly sanitized zone where even the trauma — which includes anti-Semitism, financial disadvantage and divorce — seems to go better with fresh-buttered popcorn.

Extraordinary Attorney Woo has shared that it has received multiple offers for remakes from various countries, including the US and Japan.South Korean news outlet Yonhap News Agency reported on September 6 that Astory, the production company behind the hit Netflix series Extraordinary Attorney Woo, had received proposals for remakes of the series from multiple countries, such as the US, Japan, Turkey and Germany. The offers were made during the 2022 Broadcast Worldwide convention, a broadcasting content market held in Seoul last week.Per Yonhap News Agency, Astory is currently in the midst of sorting out the details of local adaptations of the 16-episode series, sharing that it established a requirement of maintaining these individual adaptations to retain the show’s core themes. These include main character Woo Young-woo’s “warm heart towards the underprivileged and the significance of the whale”.“I think the favourable and hopeful message in [Extraordinary Attorney Woo] will resonate with people all around the world,” Astory CEO Lee Sang-baek said.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In early 2021, while Americans were focused on the transfer of power back home, daredevil director Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”) assembled a crew and flew to Afghanistan to check in on the status of America’s longest war. At that point, Osama bin Laden had been dead a decade, the Taliban was weakened but not defeated, and the U.S.-trained Afghan Army was holding its own fairly well — and yet, nearly 20 years in, there was still no end in sight for American involvement. That changed almost as soon as Heineman arrived, as the Biden administration made plans to pull out. In that moment, what might have been another business-as-usual desert war doc — with routine patrols, precisely targeted drone strikes and soldiers expressing their ennui — shifted to something audiences hadn’t seen before. The title, “Retrograde,” refers to the process by which military forces extricate themselves from conflict, removing or otherwise rendering useless the equipment they’d used to engage the enemy. For Heineman, that meant capturing all kinds of cinematic sights: A brawny soldier smashes a heap of computer monitors, helicopters airlift vehicles out, and things go boom as a team tosses all remaining ammo into a trench, douses it in gasoline and lights the pile with a well-aimed rocket. The Taliban won’t be using these bullets.

life. It’s wearing me down.”For the rest of the film, Nicholas bounces between his father’s house, which scares Beth and puts a strain on that relationship, and his mother’s place, where Kate lives in perpetual fear of what her son might do.As he did in “The Father,” which took place in an apartment that subtly and continually changed to reflect the central character’s state of mind, Zeller pays particular attention to the environments in which his characters live and work.

Naman Ramachandran A first trailer has been unveiled for Toronto selection “Salt Lake,” Kasia Rosłaniec’s exploration of late-life desire and emancipation. In the film, 64-year-old Helena announces her intention to pursue sexual experiences with other men – much to the shock of her husband of 40 years. The cast includes Katarzyna Butowtt, Krzysztof Stelmaszyk, Adam Ferency, Dorota Kolak, Dagmara Krasowska, Judyta Paradzińska and Jacek Poniedziałek. The film will screen at Toronto as part of Industry Selects – 10 titles chosen by festival programmers for their sales potential. It is produced by Warsaw-based Mañana in co-production with Common Ground Pictures from Gothenburg, Sweden, the partners behind “United States of Love,” which won a Silver Bear at Berlin in 2016. The project was presented at the Berlinale coproduction market 2020, received a Creative Europe – MEDIA development grant and Polish Film Institute production support. “Salt Lake” will be released in Poland in spring 2023.