This Woman is a shallow and frustrating documentary/fiction hybrid about a young woman, Beibei (Hihi Lee), who contemplates her role as a mother, wife and woman in modern Chinese society. Writer/director Alan Zhang has Beibei talking to the camera every now any then as though she were being interviewed. Unfortunately, she talks a lot, but actually says very little even though she makes bold statements about how she doesn't really want to be a mother nor a wife. She just felt societal pressures to be both. While her honesty is refreshing, she clearly has a lot of issues which remain unexplored regardless of whether or not those scenes are documentary or fiction. This Woman is just as bland and oversimplified as its title. Blurring the line between documentary and fiction here merely leads to frustration and confusion, so it's an unnecessary distraction. At 1 hour and 30 minutes, This Woman opens at Metrograph.
Number of times I checked my watch: 3
Time Passages is an unflinching, poignant and intimate documentary portrait of director Kyle Henry's mother, Elaine, who has dementia. Henry combines archival footage, photographs, voicemail records, re-enactments and stop-motion animation to capture and to make sense of their relationship throughout the years, including the recent pandemic. His candidness, introspection and how he's able to show his vulnerability are ultimately rewarding becomes those virtues help the audience to become engaged on an emotional level and to relate to their relationship with their own mothers That's a double-edged sword, though, because it concurrently makes the audience feel like a voyeur peering into the director's private life. Also, it's quite emotionally exhausting by the time the end credits roll. To be fair, some scenes, like two montages, go overboard in terms of visual style. There's enough substance within the film to make it cinematic, so why let the style get in the way of its substance? Hopefully Time Passages could inspire others to use an important tool to examine their life: introspection. As Plato's once wrote in Apology, "An unexamined life is not worth living." At 1 hour and 26 minutes, Time Passages opens at Cinema Village.
Number of times I checked my watch: 2
. At 1 hour and 27 minutes, Valiant One, by writer/director Steve Barnett and co-writer Eric Tipton, is a tedious, poorly shot and dull war film. It opens nationwide via Briarcliff Entertainment.
Number of times I checked my watch: 4
