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Reviews
Foxtrot (2017)
Unconvincing & tedious depiction of important themes
The methaphorical depiction of the futile repetition of war suggested by the 'Foxtrot' title deserved a better examination than this poorly acted, tedious & ultimately unconvincing movie. Even the several Foxtrot dance scenes themselves were stilted & out of place - ditto the videos of murmations of starling flocks clumsily inserted into the cinematography. In theory the plot contained a powerful narrative of the harrowing wartime experiences of the father being repeated by his conscript son but this was lost in the overly tedious & sometimes completely pointless plot - as in the scenes involving a soft-adult magazine also handed down from father to son - which just reduced the movie's important themes to comic book farce. Things improved significantly in the third act of the movie only to be deflated again by the weak final scene (..no spoilers..) It could have been so much better.
The Old Man & the Gun (2018)
Missed Opportunity
Unfortunately, Director David Lowery went for a superficial, sentimental take on the real life story of aging serial bank robber Forrest Tucker instead of a more profound & difficult examination of human nature which drove an apparently gentle man to pursue a lifetime of (admittedly non-violent) copycat robberies which inevitably ended in a total of 17 incarcerations (& 16 intriguing escapes!) starting as a 13 year old juvenile & ending as a 74 year old pensioner - (...spoiler alert...) who immediately reoffended 4 times on the same day after his final release in what seemed to be an unstoppable urge to be re-institutionalised. This was no sugar-coated Mid-West Robin Hood but a man who abandoned his wife & young family on release from one of his many jail terms & a father who made no further contact with his own two children for the rest of his life. The failure to examine troubling contradictions in Forrest Tucker's character was inevitably reflected in Robert Redford's similarly superficial take on his character - which was eclipsed by Casey Affleck's nuanced portrayal of the Detective who relentlessly pursued him & Sissy Spacek's emotionally subtle leading lady. It all could have been so much better.