john magaro – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

PAST LIVES (Berlinale 2023) – Review by Serena Seghedoni

A favorite amongst audiences and critics and a strong contender for the Golden Bear is without a doubt Celine Song’s Past Lives, screened in competition after its World Premiere at Sundance and about to be distributed theatrically in the summer by A24. We first meet the film’s protagonist, her name is Na Young (Seung Ah Moon), she’s 12 years old and she lives in South Korea. But her family soon has to emigrate from the country, which means that Nora has to leave her childhood sweetheart/best friend Hae Sung behind and take on not only a new name, but also a new identity.

Reviews

18 1/2 – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

December 19, 2022December 19, 2022 Valerie Kalfrin 18 1/2, Catherine Curtin, Dan Mirvish, Daniel Moya, john magaro, Vondie Curtis-Hall, watergate scandal, Willa Fitzgerald

The Watergate scandal revolved around a 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s Washington, DC, headquarters and eventually led to the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. One ongoing mystery of those days is what happened to eighteen and a half minutes of presumably damning conversation recorded at the White House. Nixon’s longtime personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, claimed to have erased that tape accidentally. Enter 18 1/2, where a young government transcriber, Connie (Willa Fitzgerald, Reacher), stumbles across a duplicate recording with the deleted portion intact.

Reviews

18½ – Review by April Neale

May 20, 2022May 22, 2022 April Neale 18½, Catherine Curtin, Dan Mirvish, Daniel Moya, Elle Schneider, john magaro, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Watergate tapes, Willa Fitzgerald

Looking backward and rewriting actual historical events are the order for director Dan Mirvish’s 18½. This film is a thriller laced with enough comedy to keep it off-kilter, as the premise toys with what might have happened back in 1974 when a White House transcriber named Connie (Willa Fitzgerald) with a GS2 clearance finds herself in the middle of the Watergate scandal. She has access to the “missing tape,” an 18½ minute gap in Nixon’s recorded tapes, but it conveniently disappeared. Co-writers Daniel Moya and Mirvish’s rendering of Watergate events manages to be both a fun watch, food for thought, and subtly comedically brilliant effort in its alt-historical premise.

Reviews

FIRST COW – Review by Susan Granger

December 11, 2020December 11, 2020 Susan Granger first cow, john magaro, Kelly Reichardt, orion lee

Director/co-writer/editor Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist Western takes a while to get into…first, there’s a quotation from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” In the film’s prologue, a contemporary woman (Alia Shawkat) who is walking with her dog near a broad river discovers a pair of human skeletons. Then there’s a flashback…

Reviews

FIRST COW – Review by Diane Carson

March 20, 2020March 25, 2020 Diane Carson 0 Comments first cow, john magaro, Kelly Reichardt, orion lee

First Cow is a thoroughly absorbing story of atypical, three-dimensional characters. Director and co-writer (along with Raymond) Kelly Reichardt shows again an extraordinary ability to capture the look and feel of nineteenth century America, as she did in Meek’s Cutoff. Moreover, Reichardt doesn’t flinch from presenting the dirt and squalor, the struggle for the basics of food and shelter, and the violence barely suppressed and ready to erupt at any moment.

Reviews

FIRST COW – Review by Karen Gordon

March 12, 2020March 14, 2020 Karen Gordon 0 Comments first cow, john magaro, Kelly Reichardt, orion lee

Some movies deal with the settling of the American West as mythic. And then there are films like writer/director Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, which strips it down to its basics for a more human scale and poetic vision of the Western era. Minus winners and losers, villains and heroes, this is a sparsely settled, muddy world where some people seek fortunes, and others do what they need day-to-day to survive.