My single favorite quote about the movies, from the annals of film criticism, comes from the late, great Roger Ebert. “For me,” Ebert said, “the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.”
He goes on: “If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams, and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”
Times being what they are, here in the land of the free, it can be helpful to think about empathy and to deliberately seek out different perspectives. Overseas productions and foreign-language films remain a reliable strategy for this. As luck would have it, we have two must-see films of this sort rotating into local theaters this month.
I’m Still Here, from acclaimed Brazilian director Walter Salles, tells the terrible and true story of dissident politician Rubens Paiva, who was abducted by Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971. The film is based on the 2015 memoir by Rubens’ son and focuses on the family left behind after the forced disappearance. The story is bracketed with scenes from 1996, when the now-democratic Brazilian state finally issued a report on Paiva’s fate.
I’m Still Here was a massive event when it was released in Brazil last year and was recently nominated for several Academy Awards. In fact, the film is up for Best International Feature and for Best Picture—a first for a Brazilian movie in Portuguese. Critics are lauding the film for its potent alchemy of the personal and the political in a time when authoritarianism is once again gaining momentum, worldwide.
Important consumer advocacy note: If you decide to wait for streaming with this one, make sure you don’t get the 2010 movie also titled I’m Still Here. That’s the fake documentary where Joaquin Phoenix pretends to start a hip-hop career, and it sucks with the power of one thousand industrial vacuums.
For a different overseas perspective, consider the romantic drama All We Imagine as Light, a much-heralded film out of India that’s getting picked up at several local arthouse theaters. The film follows the story of two nurses in Mumbai—one navigating a complex arranged marriage, the other enjoying a forbidden romance.
Director Payal Kapadia is being proclaimed an important new voice in cinema and her film won the Grand Prix prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year. That’s all good news—big festival awards suggest there’s a quality film experience to be had.
But stories like this, rooted in ground-level realism, also provide a sense of what contemporary life is like elsewhere on the planet. I’ll be frank: My knowledge of city life, romance, and the nursing racket in Mumbai is limited. And since I’m in the market to park my head anywhere but America, just now, this movie looks like a good time.
A third option for high-altitude perspective shifting this month, Love Me is an ambitious indie sci-fi film with an intriguing premise: Many years after humanity’s extinction, an AI ocean buoy (Kristen Stewart) and a passing satellite (Steven Yeun) ponder the nature of life and love on planet Earth. By way of surviving digital artifacts, they discover what it means to be human. Existential themes are involved. And animation. And social media, I think.
The film rather defies synopsis, actually. You’re better off checking out the trailer online. But conceptually, Love Me suggests an interesting riff on the empathy idea and it does that thing that sci-fi is good at—projecting an idea out to the event horizon, to see what happens.
Quick Picks
In honor of Black History Month, The Cary Theater is hosting a monthlong documentary series featuring films on Toni Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and more. Check the website for details.
On Feb. 14, Anthony Mackie takes over the shield-slinger role in Marvel Studios’ latest franchise installment, Captain America: Brave New World.
The extremely buzzy indie horror film Companion chronicles a weekend party that gets deeply weird when—well, spoiler rules forbid. Don’t watch the latest round of trailers if you want to go in cold.
U.K. filmmaker and working-class hero Mike Leigh returns with Hard Truths, the latest in his lifelong series of detailed family portraits steeped in humor and despair.
Presence, from the ever-restless director Steven Soderbergh, is a haunted house thriller with a technical twist: The entire film is shot from the ghost’s perspective.
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