Author Archives: Ted Shen

The politics of oil are as murky in Venezuela as anywhere, and the country’s have-nots are deeply resentful of its haves, who profit from oligopolies that pay lip service to free-market principles. Hugo Chavez, a military man who embraced democracy but wasn’t above Castro-like moves, tapped into the popular discontent when he was elected president […]

Short films about kids who help one another through predicaments. Kay Mastenbroek’s Fishing for School, a Dutch-Nigerian coproduction, is an accomplished and emotionally involving tale about a young village girl determined to get an education over the objections of her elders. Mastenbroek presents the girl’s situation with clarity and empathy, offering glimpses of colonial social […]

This 2001 Dutch film by Leonard Retel Helmrich chronicles political convulsions in Indonesia that followed the resignation of President Suharto in 1998. In Javanese and Bahasa Indonesia with subtitles. 94 min.

A talented filmmaker known for his self-assured short works, Greg Pak wrote and directed this accomplished 2002 quartet of vignettes about artificial human life. Reminiscent of George Lucas’s THX 1138, “Machine Love” stars Pak as an office android who endures ridicule from his human bosses but finds romance with a female android working in the […]

A likable mosaic of stories about dating set in the Bay Area, Sung H. Kim’s 2002 debut feature traces the romantic entanglements of three Asian-American roommates—an ambitious, womanizing executive; a drugged-out slacker; and a coffeehouse barista—each of whom defies the stereotype of the geeky Asian male in a different way. Although the complications the men […]

Eitan Londner wrote and directed this 2001 slice-of-life drama about a pregnant teen runaway in Tel Aviv (Olga Getmanski) who strikes up a friendship with a slow-witted bike messenger (Tzachi Hanan). The first half follows the girl’s seduction into the druggy rock scene, the second her rescue by the messenger, who’s mocked by passersby because […]

Director Franco Zeffirelli collaborated with soprano Maria Callas in her prime—their 1957 stage production of La traviata is the stuff of operatic legend—and his 2002 drama conveys the intimacy, admiration, and exasperation of their long-standing friendship. Fanny Ardant plays the middle-aged singer in 1976, living as a recluse in Paris and still smarting from her […]

A program of shorts about the pressures facing gay people who want to raise children. Geoffrey Nauffts wrote, directed, and stars in Baby Steps, playing a nervous but dignified schoolteacher who discloses his homosexuality during an interview with a quietly exasperated adoption agent (Kathy Bates); the preachy script is softened by the expert performances. George […]

Neema Barnette’s muckraking drama about a prison uprising piles on the cliches about abused women inmates and their lecherous, vicious male guards. The facility is operated for profit, and everyone up the command chain gets an illegal cut from the unpaid labor, but the episodic and poorly conceived script by Joyce Renee Lewis and Preston […]

Clark Jarrett’s proud but prosaic tribute to his grandfather Paul, a veteran of World War I, stitches together archival photos, vintage news clips, and interviews with Paul’s nonagenarian army buddies as it follows the son of a Nebraska cattle rancher into a momentous period in world history. Clark’s narration suffers from an aw-shucks naivete, especially […]

A small band of dissidents, led by a saxophonist named Doc Dorance, flee an authoritarian government that has banned all music, and carrying a mysterious casket, they slowly find their way to an island of caverns called “the Zone.” First-time director Pierre Desir, intent on creating a tone of elegiac doom, not only casts narrative […]

A city council’s plan to build a parking garage under Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square sets off a debate about the square’s future in this mild-mannered advocacy documentary (2001) by Moish Goldberg and Jonathan Gurfinkel. Period footage illustrates the rich history of the central square, known as King of Israel Square but changed to Rabin Square […]

In 1992 Dutch-born director Heddy Honigmann returned to her hometown of Lima, Peru, after almost 20 years and found the city an economic ruin. Caught between the rightist government and the Shining Path guerrillas, many in the dwindling middle class were struggling to make a living and moonlighting as taxi drivers. This documentary—whose title refers […]

The urgent title says it all. This 1970 Hong Kong fist-and-dagger saga delivers 103 minutes of gory, nonstop, elaborately staged manslaughter as one man (David Chiang) hunts down the gangs responsible for the murder of his brother (Ti Lung, later a star in John Woo’s action epics), a Peking Opera acrobat with an unfaithful wife. […]