'No Choice' ('Majboorim'): Film Review | Tokyo 2020

Blu-ray debutsThis year saw the first release of several Christmas favorites on Blu-ray, from Paul Feig’s 2019 sleeper hit “Last Christmas” (Universal Home Entertainment) to the first North American hi-def releases of the moving and funny anime classic “Tokyo Godfathers” (GKIDS/Shout Factory), a contemporary adaptation of the Christmas-set Western tale “3 Godfathers,” and the all-star WWII drama “A Midnight Clear” (Shout Selects).

An intellectual inquiry with burning present-day resonance, The Meaning of Hitler is also a road trip through some of the darkest chapters of European history. In one of the artfully constructed film's visual motifs, we watch the road itself through a windshield, a not-to-be-ignored Mercedes-Benz hood ornament positioned prominently in the frame.

Not to take anything away from filmmaker Dana Nachman, but her new documentary certainly benefits from the timing of its release. The film focuses on the 107-year-old Operation Santa program run by the U.S.

When it comes to baseball sayings that apply to real life, the term "swinging for the fences" couldn’t be more suitable for the three major-league hopefuls at the heart of Sami Khan and Michael Gassert’s gripping new sports documentary, The Last Out.

When Gary Duncan was arrested on trumped-up charges, essentially for being Black, his situation was hardly unique. But his readiness to fight the bogus case was nothing short of heroic, especially in 1966 Plaquemines Parish, near New Orleans, part of a region that one of the interviewees in Nancy Buirski's film calls a "totalitarian nation." The word "totalitarian" is uttered several times in A Crime on the Bayou, and on the evidence of this real-life drama, it isn't hyperbole.

In her 60-some years on Earth, Lorine Padilla has seen, done and endured enough to fill several lifetimes.

The kind of story at the heart of Baby God is sadly familiar from news reports. As text at the end of the documentary points out, "More than two dozen U.S.

Though he's adept enough at sleight-of-hand and other stage trickery to have earned the admiration of people like Ricky Jay, Penn & Teller and David Blaine, performer Derek DelGaudio bristles at the term "magician." Anyone inclined to think that makes him pretentious can look to Derek DelGaudio's In & Of Itself, in which Frank Oz documents the singular 2017 off-Broadway show (also directed by Oz) that embodies his ideal: Here, the patter employed by some ambitious illusionists becomes full-blown

Rebecca Danigelis was a 75-year-old housekeeping supervisor at a hotel when she was fired. She had $600 in savings and had cashed in her 401K to send her younger son, Sian-Pierre Regis, to college.

In 1976 Clive Cussler published Raise the Titanic!, a novel in which a team of undersea adventurers attempted to bring the famous shipwreck to the surface and recover its treasures. But Cussler's hero Dirk Pitt was late to this game: For the previous six or seven years, the CIA had been secretly attempting something similar in the real world, with a much more dangerous treasure in mind.

When singer-guitarist Karen Dalton, whose ardent fans in the Greenwich Village folk scene included Bob Dylan, died in 1993 at 55, she had long been off the music-biz grid.

"TV movie" and "nuclear annihilation" aren't readily linked concepts, and they certainly weren't back in the movie-of-the-week heyday of 1983, when ABC took a gamble on the decidedly downbeat The Day After. The Kansas-set drama, an unflinching depiction of the aftermath of an atomic conflagration, aired Nov.

David Wojnarowicz, a key figure of the 1980s art movement that flowered in the pavement cracks of New York's pre-gentrified East Village, died of AIDS in 1992 at age 37. But Chris McKim's defiantly alive collage documentary, Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker, is so charged with the words and images of the multimedia artist it could almost be considered self-portraiture, often recalling Jonathan Caouette's remarkable docu-narrative hybrid Tarnation.

The Tokyo International Film Festival handed out its audience award Monday to Japanese director Akiko Ohku's for her latest featureHold Me Back, a socially astute comedy about the romantic struggles of a Japanese woman entering her early thirties. The audience award is the only prize the Tokyo festival is presenting this year, after the international jury competition had to be scrapped in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

A 30-year-old “salaryman” — the Japanese equivalent of an office employee — is getting bored with his two girlfriends at work when a dangerous, unpredictable femme fatale overturns his life. Originally produced by Japan’s Nagoya TV as a 10-part series, this comic book adaptation directed by acclaimed filmmaker Koji Fukada was edited down to a mere 233 minutes for its theatrical release in Japan in October.

If you take a look at Forbes’ annual list of the highest paid athletes in the world, at least two or three of the top five spots are usually occupied by soccer players — and usually the same ones: Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar.

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent“Underdog,” the two-part boxing film that opens the 33rd Tokyo International Film Festival, is the second movie on the subject by director Take Masaharu. The first, “100 Yen Love” in 2014 won the Japanese Cinema Splash Award at the 27th TIFF and was selected as Japan’s nominee for Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award.

The Tokyo International Film Festival kicked off its 33rd edition Saturday with an abbreviated red carpet and a series of photo ops featuring Japanese stars separated by plexiglass dividers. Representatives of the global film community, meanwhile, including Robert De Niro, Christopher Nolan and Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux, beamed into the event via a series of video messages wishing the festival well amid the challenges of COVID-19.

Only some of Italian footballer Francesco Totti’s 334 career goals (307 scored with Roma, the only team he ever played for outside the nationals) are shown in Alex Infascelli’s bio-doc My Name Is Francesco Totti (Mi chiamo Francesco Totti). Nor is there very much aboutthe icon’s private life; there are no attempts at intimate revelations or powerful insights.