Reviews

Wonderful cinematography and landscapes dominate Sébastien Pilote's poignant, compelling, factually inspired, bittersweet, down-to-earth, well-acted,156-minute, 2021 film adapted from Louis Hémon's 1913 novel in which a pretty, headstrong 17-years-old (Sara Montpetit), who lives with her struggling, hardworking, homesteading parents (Sébastien Ricard and Hélène Florent) and five siblings (Arno Lemay, Thomas Haché, Charlotte Martin, Henri Picard, and Xavier Rivard-Désy) in rural northern Quebec, finds herself in 1900s being wooed by a woodsman and fur trapping guide (Émile Schneider), a nearby farmer (Antoine Olivier Pilon), and a well-to-do Massachusetts mill factory worker (Robert Naylor) and struggles with whom she will pick as her husband until a ser"ies of life-changing events occur.

After recklessly falling in love with the beautiful wife (Yoshira Escárrega) of a powerful, ruthless Mexican drug lord who heads up a drug cartel, escapes his fate due to a kindhearted henchman (Pedro Hernández), and then is determined to find his love when she disappears in Ivan Grbovic's engaging, poignant, award-winning, multilayered, well-acted, 105-minute, 2021 film highlighted by wonderful choreography using 35mm film, a tenacious, smitten Mexican migrant (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) takes a seasonal job working for a Canadian farmer (Claude Legault) and his adulterous wife (Hélène Florent), who have a rebellious teenage daughter (Marine Johnson), picking lettuce on the Bécotte vegetable farm in Quebec and then while researching for his love who he believes is in Montreal, gets mixed up with the discontented, estranged, unhappy family.

Jimmy Keyrouz's powerful, award-winning, factually inspired, moving, gut-wrenching, well-written, tension-filled, heartbreaking, violent, 110-minute, 2020 film based on his 2016 short movie Nocturne in Black in which a talented, endangered pianist (Tarek Yaacoub), who lives in a bombed-out building with his wannabe lawyer cousin (Sara Abi Kanaan) in a war-ravaged, ISIS-controlled Syrian town where music is forbidden, decides to fix his mother's bullet-ridden piano with the help of a Kurdish resistance soldier (Rola Beksmati) to sell to his shop owner boss (Mounir Maasri) to earn money to pay a smuggler so that he can hopefully twinkle the keys in an European orchestra and to help a resilient, orphaned boy (Ibrahim El Kurdi) have a life he deserves while working with the underground resistance to defeat terrorizing Islamist extremist fighters (Julian Farhat, et al.).

When an Austrian criminologist and former police superintendent (Murathan Muslu), who has a young daughter and is estranged from his wife (Miriam Fontaine) due to her affair with a police inspector (Marc Limpach), returns home to Vienna in 1920 following the aftermath of WWI and incarcerated as prisoner of war for two years in a Russian camp in Stefan Ruzowitzky's gripping, intense, twist-filled, morose, imaginative, well-acted, surreal, expressionist, 98-minute, 2021 crime thriller highlighted by a striking cinematography and sets, with architecturally skewed buildings mimicing the skewed mentality of the Viennese townsfolk, he works with a forensic pathologist (Liv Lisa Fries) and a police commissioner (Max von der Groeben) to investigate the grisly, sadistic slayings of former POWs (Tom Hanslmaier, Timo Wagner, Lukas Walcher, et al.) who turn up tortured and murdered while its citizens and police chief (Germain Wagner) ostracize and bully him and fellow soldiers (Aaron Friesz, Stipe Erceg, Eugen Victor, et al.) treat them like pariah.

Kate Winslet narrates Ludo and Otto Brockway's powerful, eye-opening, educational, insightful, timely, ire-inducing, shocking, controversial, depressing, 95-minute documentary highlighted by stunning cinematography that examines the massive costs in resources to produce animal food-beef, poultry, and fish-for human consumption, including massive deforestation, use of enormous quantities of potable water for growing animal feed, overfishing, producing unhealthy farm-raised fish, polluting of surface water in our oceans, lakes, and rivers and of groundwater worldwide through the use of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and antibiotics, and climate change that leads to both drought and flooding affecting food production and consists of candid commentary by indigenous people, former NOAA chief scientist Dr. Sylvia Earle, former U. N. Special Rapporteur professor Olivier de Schutter, senior environmental sustainability researcher and The Future of Food founder Dr. Marco Springmann, lecturer Joanne Kong, economic and political advisor Jeremy Rifkin, Polar Ocean Physics Group head professor Peter Wadhams, zoologist and environment and agriculture researcher Joseph Poore, Food Climate Research Network head Dr. Tara Garnett, physician and researcher Dr. Michael Greger, Virgin Group founder and chairman Richard Branson, food industry and policy consultant Roger Roberts, water management expert Prof. Arjen Hoekstra, Dr. Gemma Newman, entrepreneur and life coach Tony Robbins, Plymouth Marine Lab senior research scientist Dr. Penelope Lindeque, dietician Brenda Davis, The Good Food Institute founder Bruce Friedrich, Nutrition Org. Physician Dr. Michael Greger, virologist Dr. Jane Greatorex, environmental activist Taryn Bishop, farm fish investigator Don Staniford, EU Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan, WHO Health Emergency Programme executive director Dr. Michael Ryan, nutritional expert Dr. Udo Erasmus, Brazilian Young Farmers Association president Joaquin Pino, ITPA Conservation founder Mauricio Ruiz, former Queensland government principal scientist Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop, Norwegian fisheries director Liv Holmesfjord, former butchers Juliet Holland-Rose and Doug Maw, and vegan bodybuilders Indira Nadia Fonseca and Stephen Coote.

Joshua Sporti-g Wheeler's gripping, raw, realistic, violent, low-key, risqué, star-dotted (Rnbadguy, and Paco Loko, Candi, Cj Haskins, and Brian Wilson), 75-minute, 2021 film in which a wannabe rap artist (Joshua Sporti-g Wheeler), who hooks up with his squeeze (Kierra Lavixx), hustling in a small town in Virginia quickly gets into trouble when suspicious cops (Devin Dlove McNeil and Xavier Jones Sr.) pull him over during a traffic stop and finds a wad of cash, and he then becomes the focus of a criminal investigation involving drug dealing and murder.investigation involving drug dealing and murder.