THREE GREAT MOVIES

 

1.- PARALLEL MOTHERS

Penelope Cruz gives a smashing performance as a Madrid woman who becomes a mother in middle age - even as she's striving to win justice for her great-grandfather, murdered during the Spanish Civil War, his body tossed into a mass grave.

Director Pedro Almodovar uses melodrama to reckon with the painful history of his country, but also to reaffirm an essential truth about motherhood : history is the work of mothers - civilization can't move on without them.

2.- PASSING

In this beautifully rendered adaptation of Neilla Larsen's compact, potent 1929 novel, two girlhood friends [played, superbly, by Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga] reconnected as adults, their lives not just intersecting but colliding :

Both women are Black, but one has chosen to live as white.

First-time director Rebecca Hall gives us a deeply thoughtful spin on what we commonly call the American Dream, the ability to make something of ourselves, or to remake ourselves as we wish - so called freedom that comes, sometimes, at perilous cost.

3.- C'MON C'MON

Joaquin Phoenix gives a funny, finely wrought performance as a childless New York City radio journalist who takes charge of his precocious 9-year-old Los Angeles nephew [ Woody Norman ] for a few weeks.

How does that even sound like a whole movie? But in the hands of writer-director Mike Mills, it's everything.

No one is better at chronicling late 20th and early 21st century family affection, in all its thorny, shimmery beauty.

The World Students Society thanks Times/Stephanie Zacharek.