Mexican Film Festival
Presented by the Embassy of Mexico and The Projector, the seventh edition of the festival comes in an online and in-cinema hybrid format.
One of the seven films on the schedule will be shown both in cinema and online. The drama Suffocation (Asfixia) (2019, NC16, 88 minutes) follows Alma (Johana Fragoso Blendl), a woman with albinism recently released from prison. She takes a job caring for a man with several psychological issues to achieve a higher, longer-term goal.
When: Till July 25
Where: Online and at The Projector, 05-00 Golden Mile Tower, 6001 Beach Road
Admission: $15 a cinema ticket, $10 for a 48-hour rental period
Info: Visit The Projector website
Documentary
Gunda (PG)
93 minutes, now showing at The Projector
This black-and-white, narration-free film follows farm animals as they go about their lives. They include a sow and her piglets, a one-legged chicken and cows, all living in farms in Norway, Spain and Britain. Russian documentary-maker Viktor Kossakovsky, who made the climate-change film Aquarela (2018) shown here last year, reveals what it means to view the world through the eyes of animals which exist to serve human appetites.
Crime thriller
No Sudden Move (M18)
110 minutes, HBO Go, 4 stars
Gangster low-lifers, white-collar crooks and corporate conspiracies collide in this darkly comic crime tale set in the 1950s, a time when the United States emerged as an industrial giant in a world still shattered from a world war.
Don Cheadle is Curt Goynes, a Detroit hoodlum recently released from prison, carrying out what looks like an easy heist on behalf of a local kingpin. He is joined by Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin), goons also hired by gangster go-between Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser). What begins as a simple plan becomes decidedly less simple – bodies pile up and shared confidences are exposed as lies. Goynes and Russo find themselves caught in a web that crosses the lines of race and class.
Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, 2000), working with a screenplay from Ed Solomon (the crime thrillers Now You See Me, 2013, and Now You See Me 2, 2016, as well as the three Bill & Ted time-travel comedies, 1989, 1991 and 2020), derives pleasure from seeing antiheroes Russo and Goynes work the angles in a dangerous game that they, like the audience, cannot see in totality.
While nowhere as breezy as Soderbergh’s much-admired Ocean’s heist films (2001, 2004 and 2007), No Sudden Move still boasts his bouncy sense of rhythm. Found in patterns of speech, imaginative camera work and a jazz-inflected twangy guitar soundtrack, it is a beat that drives this industrial-age thriller from scene to scene.