Female Film Critics 24/375
The Power of the Dog sweeps the 2021 AWFJ EDA Awards with Wins in 11 out of 25 Categories. Multiple EDA Awards also go to Belfast and Encanto, and curator Maya Cade claims the Outstanding Achievement Award for founding the Black Cinema Archives. Dame Judi Dench and Ms. Rita Moreno are our Grande Dames, and guess who captured the She Deserves A New Agent Award.
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Filmmaker Kenneth Branagh’s poignant cinematic memoir of his childhood in Northern Ireland in 1969 recalls a turbulent period when Catholics and Protestants were at war with one another. His semi-autobiographical story revolves around nine year-old Buddy, who lives with his older brother, parents and grandparents. They’re Protestants in a working-class neighborhood that’s also filled with Catholic families. Then the sectarian riots begin, the barricades go up and British soldiers arrive. Chaos reigns as bewildered Buddy watches his idyllic street become an unruly battleground. During one skirmish, Buddy’s Ma rescues him using a trash can lid as a shield.
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Writer/director Kenneth Branagh’s film Belfast is based on his first nine years growing up there as the Irish Troubles erupted in 1969. It unfolds in gorgeous black-and-white that evokes the time period, yielding to color only when the family at the center of the political conflict escapes to the cinema in this autobiographical story of politics, religion, and country.
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Six Minutes to Midnight offers insight if not brilliance. This film tells a little known story with more effort than excellence. First, the title: Six minutes to midnight translates to 11:54 on a clock; 1154 translates to the telephone exchange for the British intelligence bureau charged with finding an agent. He was posing as an English teacher but went missing with his camera.
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Her story begins as she trims the shrubs in front of her typical English cottage. Joan Stanley is about to be exposed as the KGB’s longest-serving spy in Great Britain, for right after hacking away at her wayward shrub, Stanley is arrested for 27 breeches of official secrets.
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Based on the real-life story of Melita Norwood, arrested for being a KGB intelligence source, by way of Jennie Rooney’s 2013 novel, the screenplay by Lindsay Shapero makes clear enough that the “spy granny” upset lots of people. It also makes clear a series of clichés, including Joan’s initial recruitment by a conventionally exotic Communist, Sonya , who enters her Cambridge dorm room window in order to avoid being caught following an escapade with a boy.
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Based on the sensational real-life story about elderly widow Melita Norwood, who was arrested for being one of W.W.II’s top spies, this turns out to be a tepid tale that’s totally lacking in suspense.
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Is sweet little elderly English librarian Judi Dench a spy for the KGB?! There’s a lot of hot-button stuff going on in the loosely based-on-a-true-story Red Joan, from Marxist radicalization at Cambridge University in the late 1930s through sexism at Britain’s atomic-bomb project during World War II and into the Cold War…
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In the midst of movies that call for blood, curses, and mayhem, “em>Tea with the Dames offers those ingredients elegantly and eloquently from dames of the British realm who are also stars of stage and screen. At tea are Dame and Lady Joan Plowright, Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Judi Dench, and Dame Eileen Atkins.Tea with the Dames is literate, funny, poignant, a respite and a reminder. Utterly delicious, this tea with Champagne with the Dames.
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Lacking the tension it might have had had the story been presented as a thriller, Red Joan instead wallows in melodrama. What could have been the crackling story of a spy so good she got away with it for decades dissipates into weak soap opera.
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