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Robert Abele
Posts
All 15 of the Oscar-nominated short films, reviewed
Treats in small packages await the curious as the academy nominates five worthy shorts each in live-action, documentary and animation. Here's a guide to help…
‘Midwinter Break’ shows a marriage that’s too accommodating of an unspoken strain
Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds play a couple trapped in stasis, one with trauma embedded in its past, in a movie based on Bernard MacLaverty's…
In ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,’ two losers turn time travel into a fame machine
It's got nothing to do with the band but everything to do with "Back to the Future," as a duo of also-rans hope to alter…
A widow gets resourceful when the ground shifts beneath her in the feisty ‘Calle Málaga’
Spanish acting legend and Pedro Almodóvar veteran Carmen Maura commands a well-proportioned indie about the moves one makes to hold onto a sense of self.
From Iceland, ‘The Love That Remains’ shows a fractured family tied to the landscape
Filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason serves as his own cinematographer to capture the story of a family in dissolution, splitting up yet linked by routine.
A beautiful town haunted by its own racism gets its close-up in ‘Natchez’
Sensitively directed by Suzannah Herbert, a documentary about a small plantation town's ugly past — and lingering present — reveals a South still in conflict.