Little Trouble Girls review – monstrous choirmaster spikes a sublime Catholic coming-of-age tale

Utterly absorbing Slovenian debut reinvents the cliched idea of a Catholic girl’s sexual awakening, and proves that no teacher can be as cruel as a music teacher This elegant and mysterious debut from Slovenian director Urška Djukić, with its superb musical score and sound design, reinvents the cliched idea of a Catholic girl’s sexual awakening. It’s also proof, if proof were needed, that no teacher in the world can be as cruel and abusive as a music teacher. We have already seen JK Simmons’ terrifying jazz instructor in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and Isabelle Huppert’s keyboard monster in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher; now there is Slovenian actor and musician Saša Tabaković playing a demanding, yet insidious choirmaster in charge of a group of talented, vulnerable teenage girls. The film incidentally has a lesson for any teenage person watching: if a music teacher asks you to sit next to them on the piano stool with no one else in the room and murmurs “You can confide in me” … ...

A Good Person review – Zach Braff’s tale of self-healing is excruciatingly ersatz

Writer/director Braff takes Florence Pugh’s ‘good person who has done a bad thing’ on an contrived journey towards self-forgiveness

In his dual capacity as writer and director, Zach Braff here puts us through an ordeal of excruciating contrived nonsense: a masturbatory Calvary of ersatz empathy and emotional wellness. The film goes on a long, long indie-acoustic healing journey towards indie-acoustic self-forgiveness after Florence Pugh’s Allison accidentally kills her fiance’s sister and husband while driving them in her car, having taken her eyes off the road to look at her phone.

Allison breaks up with her fiance, spirals into OxyContin addiction and alcoholism and then finds herself at 12-step meetings with her fiance’s grieving old dad and AA veteran Daniel, played by Morgan Freeman, who with heartsinking inevitability delivers a sonorous voiceover of cute wisdom over the opening scene. Daniel spends a lot of time tinkering with his model railway and its hand-painted tiny human figures, a controllable mini-universe where there is no pain, you see.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/pvyUFTm
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

EXCLUSIVE: Mona Singh gears up for an intense role in an upcoming web series; Deets inside!

The Sound of Music rights acquired for Paparao Biyyala's film Music School starring Shriya Saran, Sharman Joshi