‘The Janes’ Film Review: Candid Doc Shares Extraordinary History of Underground Abortion Counseling Service

borks. And if that sounds like a really terrible idea, if only because it’s more of an invasion of privacy than usual (which is already a lot), “KIMI” agrees with you.

Tomoko (Muneaki Kitsukawa) — the young daughter of his host family — the real song drops on the soundtrack, a moment of excessive underlining. Another moment, where Smith reflects on rejecting a bribe from a Chisso executive, is complicated by unnecessarily non-linear storytelling and some aggressive scoring from composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.Cinematographer Benoît Delhomme (“At Eternity’s Gate) crafts a naturalistic look with practical lighting and a fluid camera, rendering the film with a dark beauty, but Levitas also incorporates archival and recreated footage of the protests at Chisso, as well as capturing the photographic process with slow, almost completely still black-and-white sequences.

a robot could write them. Some unlucky-in-love woman cannot find a husband (despite looking like a supermodel and having a glamorous job), so a condescending guy helps her become more appealing in order to attract Mr.

accused of sexual assault and rape.) There are plenty of other reasons to wish the perfectly watchable “Death” had been better, if only because it’s already an upgrade from the flat, purposeless “Express.” This one’s trappings are plusher, its puzzle and solution niftier, yet still not totally there as a smoothly glamorous, engrossing piece of escapism.Christie aficionados may wonder what a grey WWI prologue in Belgium’s blood-soaked trenches has to do with Mediterranean misadventure. But Branagh and Green believe, a tad obnoxiously, that Poirot is more interesting if he’s less comical oddball and more heavy-headed hero with a lost love.

Flag Day, in which he also stars, he has clearly “still got it”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. In this “very watchable and well-made family drama”, he plays the real-life swindler John Vogel, who was pursued by the FBI in the 1990s for forging $100 bills on an industrial scale. Penn exudes a “buzzard-like watchfulness” as the sociopathic Vogel; his “seductive address to the camera is almost unrivalled”.

What do you have to say to the Russian people in the event of your death? Filmmaker Daniel Roher (“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band,”) asks his subject, political Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny, at the beginning of his engrossing new doc “Navalny.” “C’mon,” Navalny scoffs, dismissively, as if highly attuned to Roher’s “gotcha” question he could frame posthumously in the case of the political agitator’s untimely death.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle EditorThandiwe Newton wants to know why the BFI London Film Festival did not accept “President,” the award-winning documentary she produced about the 2018 Zimbabwe presidential election.The Camilla Nielsson-directed film chronicles young presidential hopeful Nelson Chamisa’s unsuccessful bid to unseat Pres. Emmerson Mnangagwa, the country’s former vice president who staged a military coup that ousted decades-long dictator Robert Mugabe.

shortlist.Turner’s “Lynching Postcards: Token of a Great Day” looks back at the history of lynching in America through the ways they’ve been documented on souvenir postcards from 1880 to 1968.Turner described how photographers would take pictures of the lynchings and create postcards of the imagery that people would then send to their friends and family. She says that while the imagery was “graphic,” she tried to focus viewers’ eyes on the amount of people attending the lynchings and the fact that families were there, rather than the lynching itself, to properly contextualize the point in time.“We’re going beyond the brutality of the body itself, but that is also part of what I want viewers to confront,” she said.

th feature film, Allen returns to a well that is not so much dry as desiccated. The movie opens with Wallace Shawn as our Allen doppelgänger, Mort Rifkin. Mort, an anxious former professor, is also a dedicated cinephile and self-defined intellectual who spends the next hour and a half complaining vociferously to his analyst.He’s reminiscing about a troubled trip to Spain’s San Sebastián Film Festival, which he recently took with his publicist wife, Sue (Gina Gershon).

Guy Lodge Film CriticIf the Jane Collective has gone under-credited in American women’s rights history over the last half-century, independent cinema is doing its best to make up for lost time. Right on the heels of Phyllis Nagy’s colorful fictionalized drama “Call Jane,” “The Janes” is the second film at this year’s Sundance festival dedicated to the female-staffed, Chicago-based underground service that provided over 11,000 illegal abortions to women in need between 1968 and 1973, at which point Roe v.

awesome,” she says, in a doomed attempt to sublimate her own fear while sharing her bestie’s excitement. And when Jane is hurt by Lucy’s withdrawal, her boyfriend (Jermaine Fowler, “Coming 2 America”) offers the kind of thoughtful advice we’d all want from our significant others.So it does feel a bit jarring when characters around them are sketched more as a symbols or even caricatures.