‘Mucho Mucho Amor’: Film Review

Winner of both prizes awarded in the Next category of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, “I Carry You With Me” tells the true story of an undocumented gay couple from Mexico who risk their lives for love, liberty and the American Dream.

Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi have just two requests on their wedding registry ahead of the impending royal event in May.The 31-year-old daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah, Duchess of York, who will tie the knot with her Italian fiancé at the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace, is using her nuptials to bring light to an important part of their life.

Landlocked by South Africa on all sides, the kingdom of Lesotho is a place of high skies, wide landscapes and narrow prospects for its two million inhabitants: a set of dimensions somehow captured in every exquisitely constructed, square-cut frame of “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.” A haunted, unsentimental paean to land and its physical containment of community and ancestry — all endangered by nominally progressive infrastructure — this arresting third feature from Lesotho-born

A leisurely, somewhat hazy travelogue compared to the piercing political indictments of his acclaimed prior “We Come as Friends” and Oscar-nominated “Darwin’s Nightmare,” Austrian documentarian Hubert Sauper’s new “Epicentro” looks at Cuba on the brink of colossal transition, as the old Communist system is in its apparent death throes, and free-market capitalism waits in the wings. It’s a fascinating moment for cultural stock-taking.

Some movie stars level a kind of divinity that transcends personal preference — woe betide the dissenter who openly finds Audrey Hepburn cloying, or Cary Grant less than charming. That Bruce Lee had long ascended to that level of iron-clad cool was underlined by the biggest popular quibble with “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” over the single scene when Mike Moh’s fictive Lee is portrayed as an arrogant, bullying jerk easily whupped by Brad Pitt’s stuntman Cliff.

Every summer, more than 1,000 teens swarm the Texas capitol building to attend Boys State, the annual American Legion-sponsored leadership conference where these incipient politicians divide into rival parties, the Nationalists and the Federalists, and attempt to build a mock government from the ground up.

There is a Robert Frost poem called “Escapist – Never” which provides a frequent refrain in Greg Barker’s deeply admiring but drawn-out biopic of Brazilian diplomat and U.N. leading light Sergio Vieira de Mello.

It’s exciting, and fascinating, to see a great director of documentaries try his or her hand at a dramatic feature, since in theory the essential skill set should all be there. The best documentarians possess an acute visual sense, and they are all, of course, potent storytellers.

Sultry music swells as the camera swoons over a young couple in a tender nighttime embrace. The 1950s residential New York City street is carefully rain-slicked and lined with shiny classic cars: an obvious stage set.

There’s mannered, there’s manic, and then there’s the malfunctioning pinball-machine delirium that Ben Whishaw brings to “Surge”: a blinking, buzzing, flashing clatter of hyper-accelerated impulses, chicken-fried synapses and staggered hypnic jerks that never culminate in sleep.

Inventor Nikolai Tesla is more popular today than when he died penniless in a New York hotel in 1943. Back then, he was the futurist who swore he could summon unlimited, clean, wireless electromagnetic energy from the earth — a neat idea, but surely coal and oil were fine.

Actress Romola Garai makes a distinctive feature directorial debut with “Amulet,” even if this upscale horror drama is ultimately more impressive in the realm of style than substance. It’s some style, though: She hasn’t just created a stylish potboiler, but a densely textured piece that makes for a truly arresting viewing experience to a point. A shame then that the film succumbs somewhat to the more pretentious and silly aspects of Garai’s initially cryptic puzzle of a script.

At the risk of overselling Edson Oda’s ultra-original, meaning-of-life directorial debut, there’s a big difference between “Nine Days” and pretty much every other film ever made. You see, most movies are about characters, real or imagined, and the stuff that happens to them, whereas “Nine Days” is about character itself — as in, the moral dimension that constitutes who a person is, how he or she treats others, and the choices that define us as humans.

Late in the film “Lance,” a documentary that depicts the ascent and the crash of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, the subject recalls the disappearance of his lucrative sponsorships. These deals — with a massive market value and a perhaps more important intangible value of keeping him in the public eye as a figure of rectitude and hard work — were in some sense his life’s work, and they vanished after his 2013 admission that he had used illegal doping throughout his cycling career.

There have been some good dramas about people sliding into dementia, like “Away From Her” and “Still Alice,” but I confess I almost always have a problem with them. As the person at the center of the movie begins to recede from her adult children, from the larger world, and from herself, he or she also recedes — at least, this is my experience — from the audience.

There are small, telling differences in the way each of the three long-separated main characters in “Farewell Amor” remembers the day of their reunion. Standing at JFK, awkwardly clutching a bunch of flowers to give to the wife and child he has not seen in 17 years, Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine from “The Chi”), a soft-spoken Angolan taxicab driver greets Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), the teenage stranger who is his daughter, and she is surly and unsmiling.

Imagine a high-ratings, high-stakes game show that trivializes a convict’s life-or-death fate for public consumption. As wild as it sounds, a version of this reality TV entertainment apparently really exists in modern-day Iran, where writer-director Massoud Bakhshi’s “Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness” is set, and where a wildly popular edition of it has been airing for nearly a decade.

The battle lines of territorial masculinity are drawn with compelling psychological complexity in Summer White, in which a 13-year-old boy impatient to become a man grows increasingly hostile to the presence of his single mother's new partner in their lives. Mexican director Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson establishes a domestic situation of almost unhealthy mutual emotional dependency and then ruptures it with the arrival of an outsider whose kindness and generosity make him even more of a threat.

Shirley Jackson was a real person, a writer best known for her twisted short story “The Lottery,” although the version presented in Josephine Decker’s “Shirley” feels more like a character from one of her own novels.

In the 1976 Oscar-winning classic, Network, Faye Dunaway’s character refashions television news into entertainment, and one of the features she inaugurates is a segment called “Sybil the Soothsayer,” which spews out nightly doses of prophecies for the masses.