Mark Asch

By Mark Asch “Follow the money” is the imperative of every Steven Soderbergh movie: since Traffic helped inaugurate the “everything is connected” genre, he’s tracked the flow of circulating commodities from viruses to athletes, and his heist films invert the find-the-lady deceptiveness of global finance to redistributive ends. The Laudromat, his Panama Papers movie, aims…

By Mark Asch A feature-length version of the scene in Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997) in which an astronaut’s teary-eyed daughter begs her daddy not to go into space, Alice Winocour’s Proxima follows Eva Green as she juggles parenting an eight-year-old and preparations for a year aboard the International Space Station. Sarah (Green) shares custody of…

By Mark Asch At Cannes 2015, an Un Certain Regard jury headed by Isabella Rossellini awarded its top prize to Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams, a film about the congenital stubbornness of Iceland’s aging rural population which, with its agricultural wit and final shot of feuding twin brothers in a symbolic return to the womb, reached for…

By Mark Asch Surely autobiographical, fortysomething Lebanese writer-director Oualid Mouaness’ debut fiction feature 1982 views the Israeli invasion into the then civil-warring nation from the unlikely, ultimately unpropitious vantage of an English-language private school in East Beirut at the end of the school year. Fifth-grader Wassim (Mohamad Dalli) scrambles to finish his exams and muster…