Aki Kaurismäki
While managing to meaningfully touch on universal themes of community, self-identity, believing in others and caring for those in need, the messages of the Paddington franchise would mean so much more if it would just let go of its villains.
Stephanie Archer discusses three foreign films from this year’s NYFF that examine realities shattered and the consequences that follow.
Kaurismaki’s latest, The Other Side Of Hope, an intriguing take on the immigration crisis, keeps its important subject at arm’s length.
Le Havre (2011) is a still, quiet and dryly hilarious film. It has many of the qualities of a Japanese master like Mizoguchi, but if he had emigrated to a small French port and had been forced to make working class comedies. It focuses on a shoe shiner called Marcel Marx whose wife contracts a seemingly terminal disease.
