With IT'S A SIN, Russell T. Davies scores another all-round smash via his moving and joyous AIDS-hits-the-Brits series

 

Of course you'll expect to be greatly moved and saddened by any film or series exploring the effects of AIDS on the characters with whom you've come to be involved. What you may not initially expect from IT'S A SIN -- the latest first-rate entertainment and thought-provoker created and written by Russell T. Davies (Years and Years, A Very English Scandal, Banana, Torchwood, Doctor Who, and Queer as Folk, among so many others) -- is the out-and-out joy and delight you'll experience from being in the company of these lovely, funny, full-bodied folk.

Mr. Davies -- pictured center left, with his leading cast members, left to right, Lydia West, Olly Alexander, Nathaniel Curtis, Omari Douglas and series standout Callum Scott-Howells as Colin, whose character is the quietest, saddest (because he only just beginning to form) and whose halting, hopeful performance is very close to perfection --  has again done what he does so well: come up with a concept and characters who grab us from the outset and, for all their change, growth and bad decisions, never let us go and, in the process, give us not merely entertainment (in spades yet!) but the glorious and profound sense of life as it was and is.

No secret nor surprise that Davies' interests lie with the LGBT crowd, yet how he captures parents, straight friends, doctors, hospital workers, police and society at large is as filled with caring, anger and understanding -- as are his assessments of the gay community.  (That's Keeley Hawes, above, right, playing Alexander's character's mom, in a fraught scene toward the series' finale.)

Davies sees his people as never fully formed but still growing, learning and changing, even as they stumble, fall and rise again. Or sometimes not. In the large and splendid cast are luminaries such as Neil Patrick Harris (above, playing a mentor to young Colin) and the great Stephen Fry (below, left) as one in the country's subservient, bent-but-closeted, right-wing political class.

TrustMovies never imagined he would care to return to those awful years of AIDS deaths, yet films like the recent French César winner, Beats Per Minute, and now this British series, have thoroughly disabused him of that notion. God damn, but these characters can sure have a grand old time! And Davies, with the help of his sterling cast, makes sure that we -- despite all our caring and crying and recalling -- have a grand and memorable one, too. 

Now streaming via HBO Max in five episodes that you can view one after another, no waiting period between them, It's a Sin will certainly end up on a lot of Best-of-Year lists, I should think. 

Absolutely in a class all by itself: Makoto Nagahisa's WE ARE LITTLE ZOMBIES

Mashing up so many dfferent genres while remaining utterly its own original, WE ARE LITTLE ZOMBIES gave me the most bizarre and special movie experience I've had since first encountering South Korea's lollapalooza, Save the Green Planet. First of all, this film is as witty -- verbally and visually -- as anything you have recently (or even not so recently) seen. It moves like a house afire, telling the tale of the meeting and life thereafter of four children, all orphaned on the same day, and all already fed up with adults and life as they have so far experienced it.

I think it is safe to say that writer/director -- whose first full-length film this is after a single, award-winning short -- Makoto Nagahisa (shown at right) is clearly a born filmmaker. Except that he may soon tire of the medium, since I am not certain what more he could give that he has not already provided via this film. We shall see.

Meanwhile, We Are Little Zombies addresses it all -- love (given, but mostly withheld), death, grief, contemporary life, parenting (mostly bad) -- even as it cleverly, delightfully indicts parents, adults in general, Japan in particular, and consumers and society at large (both eastern and western). Have I left anyone or anything out, Nagahisa?

Yet this indictment is so funny, fresh and endlessly entertaining that movie buffs ought not mind, even if more mainstream audiences may throw up their hands in disarray. Who cares? How the filmmaker gives us these kids and their back stories, those parents and their deaths, the real and surreal, fantasies, facts, fishbowls and so much more will make you grateful you still have eyes and ears.

While a Puccini tune runs throughout the film, its oddball musical numbers are amazing in their own right. For a while the film seems like some old-fashioned videogame come to life, and then around the midway point it takes a turn -- for the even better. Our heroes/heroine become a kid band, complete with their own sleazy/sweet manager (the red-head above),

before moving into the utterly surreal/unreal/too real. And still, the energy and wit never flag. Sweet, sad, profound, memorable and certainly one of this year's best movies,  We Are Little Zombies also proves to be the zombie movie to end them all, even without the de rigueur flesh-eating. (The scene in which we suddenly see the zombies -- and their "attachment" -- proves a perfect humdinger.)

From Oscilloscope Films and running a full two hours (from which I would not have wanted to cut one minute), the movie opens today in virtual and real cinemas all across the USA. Click here and then follow directions to learn how and where you can view it. Oh, and I want to nominate for the Movie Faces Hall of Fame little lead actor Keita Ninomiya. What a face -- and what a beautiful pair of eyes this kid has!

Home video debut for Billy Senese's pretty-good hospital horror flick, THE DEAD CENTER

Opening theatrically only last week, for a very limited release and soon to be available via home video, THE DEAD CENTER, a relatively quiet, unusual hospital-set horror/thriller written and directed by Billy Senese (his sophomore effort in the full-length division) turns out to be worth a watch due to its highly unsettling atmospherics and storytelling techniques. Something awful is happening from the get-go, but so fractured is what we initially see -- yet so weirdly fascinating -- that we hold on, and on, as some sort of explanation is slowly given us.

Mr. Senese, pictured at left, knows how to do low-key scares quite well, along with providing a group of just slightly off-kilter characters, all of them -- even the killer -- sympathetic in their individual pain and torment.

Further, he has set his film mostly in and around a beleaguered city hospital, barely surviving the usual cost-cutting measures to keep things going, even if they're going not so well.

At the enter of the tale are two men: a caring, if hugely problematic doctor (played by Shane Carruth, below) and a seemingly risen-from-the-dead John Doe (Jeremy Childs, further below), who has disappeared from the morgue, after having already killed some folk, and who will soon begin yet another murder rampage.

For a nice change, this hospital seems to have a mostly caring staff, who treat the patients -- in this mental health division, at least -- with as much respect as it can muster, given the economic situation which well reflects our current times of hospitals under-staffed or simply closing down.

Meanwhile, a third character -- a forensic doctor played by Bill Feehely -- trying to locate that missing corpse begins piecing together evidence of who this very weird fellow is, along with what, maybe, is actually going on.

These three men come together, sort of, at the finale, which is a wild, horrific thing, somewhat tamped down by the filmmaker's refusal to push murder and gore ahead of his more human, character-driven concerns.

The film's problems, for TrustMovies, at least, involve a plot in which, despite the "mystery" in front of us, things still seems a bit too obvious, so that we keep ahead of the game by just enough to grow impatient to get to the final stage. We do, but even that seems just a tad derivative of other sci-fi/horror outings.

As too often happens, the mystery is a lot more fun than its solution, and again, the journey is better than the destination. But Senese and his fine cast certainly keep us going -- and thinking and wincing as we move along.

From Arrow Video (released here in the states via MVD Entertainment Group) and running 93 minutes, The Dead Center (not sure just what that title is meant to signify, other than death) will hit the street this coming Tuesday, October 22, on Blu-ray and DVD for purchase and (I hope) rental.

Death, decay and dysfunction in Shawn Snyder's dark buddy movie, TO DUST

Decomposition is paramount in the new and very dank/oddball growth-through-friendship movie, TO DUST, co-written (with Jason Begue) and directed by first-time full-length filmmaker Shawn Snyder (shown below).

In it, a cantor from an Orthodox Jewish community in upstate New York who has just lost his wife to cancer, finds himself coming apart at the seams, prone to nightmares involving death and decay, and unable to function as father to his two sons.

Because this religious community has, as is typical, cut itself off from as much as possible of the remaining (and what some might call "normal") world, our cantor cannot find proper help from his own highly traditional and strictured community and so must go elsewhere.

This is not so easy, thanks to the many rules and regulations involved in Orthodox living. Simply speaking to a woman in an office outside the community, for instance, in a no-no. So the cantor, Shmuel (played by Géza Röhrig, at right on poster, top, and below, whom you'll remember from his commanding performance in the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-winner, Son of Saul), rather like a bull in a china shop, barges his way into the classroom and the life of a local community-college science teacher named Albert (Matthew Broderick, at left on poster, top, and below), whom he then forces to explain to him, in minute detail, how a corpse decays.

If this sounds like one of the least believable meet-cutes in the history of cinema, well, it is. But is is also just bizarre and bleak enough to maintain one's initial interest. And if these two characters are barely developed -- Shmuel has but a single characteristic, grief; while Albert seems a lonely outsider who, in the comfort of his home, wears a woman's housedress -- both Broderick and Röhrig are consummate professionals who bring every bit of their talent to the proceedings and manage, at least while we're watching them, to create life and truth here.

The movie's insistence on exploring decay and decomposition -- initially via pigs and finally at a human corpse farm outside Knoxville, Tennessee -- may turn off more than a few viewers. Those who stick with the film will get the expected feel-good resolution  that, even though it arrives via means as bleak as all else here, seems no more believable that the movie's meet-cute beginning. And the relationship between the two men is so unbelievable that it must be taken -- whole-hog, so to speak -- on faith. Thank god for Broderick and Hashem for Röhrig, as these two guys do all they can to make the trip witty and enjoyable.

The supporting cast has little to do but certainly does it well enough, while the technical aspects of the movie, while seldom belying the small budget, are handled professionally. And if you are one of those viewers (unlike me) who disdains profanity, here's the film for you: In the disc on which I viewed To Dust, all of the curse words on the soundtrack had been bleeped out!

From Good Deed Entertainment and running 91 minutes (in the version I saw, at least; the IMDB has the film clocking in at 105 minutes), To Dust opens here in South Florida this Friday, March 15, in the Miami area at the AMC Aventura 24 and AMC Sunset Place, in Fort Lauderdale at The Classic Gateway, in Boca Raton at the Regal Shadowood and Living Room Theaters, in Palm Beach Gardens at Cobb's Downtown 16; in Tamarac at The Last Picture Show, and at the Movies of Delray and the Movies of Lake Worth.

Shubhashish Bhutiani's HOTEL SALVATION explores life, death and family in India

When the grandfather of the family suddenly announces that he is soon going to die and wants to make his final pilgrimage to a holy city on the banks of the Ganges River, his adult son -- an overworked accountant or financial planner, from the sound of things -- first tries to convince his father otherwise but then finally agrees to accompany him on the trip.

From this unusual premise comes a movie -- HOTEL SALVATION, co-written (with Asad Hussain) and directed by first-time full-length filmmaker, Shubhashish Bhutiani, shown at right) -- that offers up almost all the usual and expected results: father-son arguments, followed by some bonding, family problems and relationships brought to the fore and then solved. Surely you know the routine by now.

What makes this movie a bit different is all the detail that arrives via its sub-continent setting: the religion, the life, the culture and the cuisine in which we're steeped.

The immediate family (shown below) provides our main characters: the grandfather Daya (Lalit Behl, center), father Rajiv (Adil Hussan, left), mother Lata (Geetanjali Kulkarni, near right) and daughter Sunita (Palomi Ghosh, far right).

Once Daya and Rajiv have reached their Ganges destination and its titular hotel, we meet more diverse and interesting characters such as the hotel proprietor and a widow woman (Navnindra Behl, below, right), who, it turns out, has been waiting quite a few years for her time to die.

Along the way we get a number of light philosophical discussions about life, death and religion (this is definitely Salvation-lite), some family history to sort out, and interesting religious practices such as bathing a corpse in the Ganges and then cremating it, drinking "holy" water from that same river (yikes!) and donating a cow (wow!).

Interestingly enough, what looks like the film's climax arrives in the middle, but then we're suddenly up and running again. And if the movie -- except for its location -- takes us nowhere we've not been previously, in one culture or another, its actual finale provides a nice mix of sorrow and an odd sort of joy. It is both predictable and moving.

From Film Movement, in Hindi with English subtitles and running 100 minutes, Hotel Salvation hits DVD and digital this coming Tuesday, July 10 -- for purchase and/or rental.

A great film arrives: João Dumans and Affonso Uchôa's quietly magnificent ARABY

"Stick with it, please." I've said this before, but I don't think it has ever been more necessary or appropriate than with ARABY, the new movie from the writing/directing duo of João Dumans and Affonso Uchôa: If you stay with this quiet little film -- despite its leisurely pacing, refusal to overly dramatize, and a protagonist who suddenly shifts from the expected one to an entirely different person -- by the time you reach the conclusion of this 98-minute movie, you will have experienced labor, the workplace, love, life, death and maybe as close to the whole of humanity as any single movie is able to provide.

Filmmakers Dumans (above, right) and  Uchôa (above, left) build their small monument to the life of 90 per cent from this statement uttered by their protagonist early on: "In the end, all we have is what we remember." From this, they have crafted a tale that concentrates on but one man (Aristides de Sousa, shown below) yet takes in much of our world, building via an aggregate of detail to a conclusion that, though in no way surprising, still suddenly seems to expand into enormous compassion and understanding.

How in hell did the filmmakers manage this feat? As best TrustMovies can tell, it comes via a kind of visual and verbal poetry that, like all else here, goes nearly unnoticed -- until it suddenly begins resonating like crazy. (I may simply be slow; all this might resonate a lot earlier with you.) Maybe it has to do with that trickly transfer of feeling for a single human being into an understanding of humanity itself.

This is a Brazilian film, after all. I've long thought that Brazil seems to treat its people about as cavalierly, if not in downright uncaring fashion, as any supposedly "democratic" South American country. We see this in a government that spends oodles to host the Olympic Games only to put its populace in ever more dire straits. And via films from Elite Squad and its follow-up (that bang you atop the head with violence against the people) to the quieter, probing films of Kleber Mendonça, the great preponderance of humanity is alway given the shaft.

In Araby, this is true all over again, and yet via its protagonist and the people he meets along his journey of laboring-just-to-survive, we enter the world of the masses in a manner subtly different from other films. Here, it's via a kind of memoir our hero has composed (when we at last learn why and where he began this memoir, it becomes ever more meaningful and humane) that tells his story as best he is able.

The lovely, heartbreaking irony here comes from the fact that our hero, Cristiano, feels that he cannot communicate or express himself very well. Yet the filmmakers provide him voice and view so that he is able to give us everything we need to understand the love he feels, the loneliness he experiences and his constant need to not simply survive but to communicate.

I would think that there must be millions of workers in China and India -- hell, even some Trump acolytes here in the USA -- who could identify with and understand this movie.  There are no "labels" attached to any view here, and yet Dumans and Uchôa offer up enormous political commentary. By the time the film has come full circle, its impact has burgeoned into such collective power and momentum that, days after I've viewed it, I am still reliving and thinking about this movie.

From Grasshopper Film, in Portuguese with English subtitles, Araby opens this Friday in New York City at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and then will hit another four cities on either coast, with -- one hopes -- even more cities to follow over the weeks to come. Click here and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on Where to Watch to view all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters. 

At NYC's Film Forum, Rüdiger Suchsland's treasure-trove of seldom-seen movies -- HITLER'S HOLLYWOOD: GERMAN CINEMA IN THE AGE OF PROPAGANDA: 1933 - 1945

History buffs, particularly film history aficionados, will likely revel in the new documentary opening at New York City's Film Forum this Wednesday, for it will opens the doors to what (for most of us non-Germans, at least) we have only heard of fleetingly and certainly never seen: those movies -- more than a thousand of them! -- produced by Nazi Germany during the Third Reich. Thanks also to Film Forum, we've seen a couple of documentaries over recent years that showed us some of the especially antisemitic movies the Nazis produced (two fine docs by Felix Moeller: Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss and Forbidden Films: The Hidden Legacy of Nazi Film), but this new one is like a deep dive -- psychologically and historically -- into a particular German cinema that, while plenty antisemitic, is also romantic, crazy, bizarrely funny and really quite sad. And sick.

Written and directed by Rüdiger Suchsland (shown at left), HITLER'S HOLLYWOOD: GERMAN CINEMA IN THE AGE OF PROPAGANDA, 1933 - 1945 proves an unveiling of the past that few of us (even, I suspect, younger generation Germans) will not have seen. Out of the hundreds of movies made under the Third Reich (many of which probably never survived) Herr Suchsland has chosen snippets from a very interesting array to tantalize us, as well as put forth some pretty compelling theories regarding what and why.  What did Nazi Germany dream about?" the director asks early on. Death is the answer. These movies are full of self-sacrifice and an almost mythical, mystical yearning for death.

But, golly, so many of these deaths were somehow "happy" ones -- at least in Nazi cinema. The movie never states this, but I could not help but wonder if Hitler and his closest crew -- Goebbels, Himmler and even Leni Reifenstahl -- somehow knew (and on some weird level even wanted this) that their whole enterprise was doomed from the start. When you dedicate everything to death, rather than life, what the hell are you actually asking for?

One of the many little jolts of recognition that arrive regularly throughout the film comes as Suchsland explains how almost completely devoid of irony and how full of "forced cheerfulness" Nazi movies are. You may remember at that point how often German cinema of the 40s, 50s and 60s was accused of having little sense of humor. Thankfully, that's no longer true (see Look Who's Back and Not My Day, for two very funny recent examples.)

Another example: As we watch those "amazing" parades of German youth dressed in military garb, Suchsland sums it all up: "Modern Synchronized movement. And future cannon fodder." Yes, death again.  There's even more "happy death," as we examine briefly Hitler's Euthanasia movement. And did you know that the German version of Titanic, while banned in its home country, was still allowed to be seen in the "occupied" territories?

Among the enormous number of directors, actors, and actresses who parade before us, several stand out, one of whom is described by Suchsland as "a Janus-headed artist stuck between collaboration and resistance," the work of whom Goebbels despised but Himmler loved. According to the filmmaker, one late-in-the-game movie -- Großstadtmelodie -- seems to actually defend the right to privacy and even happiness in the here and now! So take that, death-lovers!

How the filmmaking changed as Germany became ever-more Nazi, went to world war and then began to lose that war is captured via the parade of films we see. And while, along the way, you may wonder about some of Suchsland's conclusions, it is clear that this filmmaker knows a hell of a lot more about German filmmaking during this period that any of us, so it will be difficult to disagree with many of his conceptions. He makes a generally fine guide to a period of filmmaking in a specific place that many of us may imagine we know but until now, at least, have mostly been flying blind.

Hannah Arendt and her ideas make a helpful, thoughtful appearance or two, helping to stress Suchsland's major point: that a country's people can indeed become -- at least in their own mind and imagination -- the movies that they see. Hitler's Hollywood proves quite the  revelation; for anyone interested in the filmmaking of this time and place, it is not to be missed.

From Kino Lorber and running 105 minutes, the documentary opens in its U.S. theatrical premiere at New York City's Film Forum this Wednesday, April 11, for but a one-week-only engagement. It is also scheduled to be seen in Baltimore at the Parkway Theater, beginning April 27, and in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center on May 11. Click here and scroll down to keep abreast of any further playdates, cities and theaters.