Word: aleandro
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...taping over the light switches and hiding everyone's cell phones; there is to be no electronic interference with true belief. Grandpa is a blind veteran of various Israeli wars and keeps a loaded gun handy in case the enemy decides to storm their apartment. Mom (the divine Norma Aleandro) desperately pretends that everyone is normal, and Dad is simply AWOL...
...Only Human is about as wee as a movie can get. Just 85 minutes long, it is a first feature by a Spanish husband-wife team, Dominic Harari and Teresa De Pelegri, and with the exception of Aleandro it features no one any American has ever heard of. This may be to its advantage - you bring no particular expectations of hilarity to it. The fact that it is Spanish somehow helps, too. Different cultures do things differently than we do, and so we're marginally more acceptant of strange behavior in exotic climes than we are when, say, Owen Wilson...
...normal evening; two old school chums are getting together after seven years, catching up on each other's news. Alicia (Norma Aleandro) is particularly eager for Ana (Chunchuna Villafaņe) to meet Gaby, the five-year-old girl she and her husband adopted when she was an infant. Late that night the two women sit gossiping and getting tiddly on eggnogs when, without at first modulating her tone, Ana explains why she left Argentina so suddenly, without saying goodbye to anyone. It is a tale of midnight abduction, a blow to her head--and waking up naked, tied...
...Story wisely does not state. There is no Solomonic wisdom applicable to this situation. In any event, the film's business is not to unwind a plot but to frame a parable about the individual's relationship to totalitarianism. And that is subtly written on the lovely face of Aleandro as she descends from serenity and self-possession to a final, harrowing acknowledgment that her privileged life was based on willed blindness, that her future is as an emotional desaparecido. Hers is a performance that one knows will not be forgotten, much as one would like to try to erase...
...Ricardo Darin) runs a prosperous, but crisis-ridden restaurant, his ex-wife is a shrew, his daughter and his girlfriend are variously estranged, and now his aged father wants to remarry his mother in the church wedding he refused her 44 years ago. Trouble is, Mom (the great Norma Aleandro) has Alzheimer's, and the church is dubious about the ceremony. Heart attack and midlife crisis are, naturally, Rafael's lot. Ours is pure pleasure as he works his way toward a more contented state in this wry, richly layered, wonderfully observed Argentine film...