Sleeping Giant
Writer/director Cividino expanded a short film for this study of three teenage boys (Jackson Martin, Reece Moffett, Nick Serino) bonding and fighting in cottage country, and the padding occasionally shows. But Sleeping Giant is still a particularly -assured and beautiful first feature, observing the ugly awkwardness of male adolescence against the gorgeous, indifferent backdrop of Lake Superior. (See full review).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch: iTunes
Youth
Two old friends, retired composer Fred (Michael Caine) and film auteur Mick (Harvey Keitel), meet at a swanky Swiss resort and muse about aging and their fears of diminishing creative powers.
Sounds like a cliché – and potentially creepy given the nubile young women cavorting all over the place – but in the hands of the great Paolo Sorrentino (of The Great Beauty, last year’s foreign-language film Oscar winner), it’s a wonder. (See full review).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch: Netflix
Summertime
Captivating performances by Izïa Higelin and Cécile de France carry a lesbian romance that’s sexy and passionate but also pretty wobbly.
The pic, set in tumultuous early-70s France, is laboured in presenting how Higelin’s farm girl and de France’s Parisian feminist meet and unconvincingly brief when developing their attraction, which at first seems all about the sex. (See full review).
Rating: NNN
Mustang
Five teenaged girls living in a seaside Turkish village are having a little too much fun celebrating the end of the school year. Their punishment? The family patriarch – the uncle who’s raised them since their parents’ death – puts them under house arrest and starts marrying them off.
Ergüven empathetically presents the village women – especially the girls’ grandmother – as more bent on protecting the girls than controlling them, but she’s plainly furious with the entire system. That anger, however, never takes over or messes with the craft. She gets great performances from her cast and creates gorgeous images of the five sisters at play and in repose. (See full review).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch: Netflix
OUR LITTLE SISTER
After their father dies, three adult sisters (Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Kaho) invite their teenage half-sister (Suzu Hirose) to come and live with them in their home outside of Tokyo.
Kore-eda (After Life Nobody Knows Like Father, Like Son) may be adapting the contemporary manga Umimachi Diary, but he’s working in the classical style of Yasujiro Ozu, finding entire worlds in the microcosm of one family. (See full review).
Rating: NNN
