The New Republic

Goodbye Solo.  Rahmin Bahrani, American-born
son of Iranian parents, made his first two films about New York. But his third, set in North Carolina, is Iranian
in mood and manner.  A Senegalese taxi
driver and a grizzled American loner are linked by the prospect of the latter’s
suicide.  Tender, deep, beautiful.  (5/6/09)

Hunger.  A somewhat
abstract rendering of  grim facts.  In 1981 Bobby Sands, an IRA activist in a
British prison, leads a hunger strike against prison conditions. He gives his
life  for the cause.  The director, an English artist named Steve
McQueen, treats the story with emphasis on the spirit, rather than the
politics.  Magnificent.  (Reviewed 4/15/09)

Katyn.  The eminent Polish director
Andrzej Wajda crowns his long career with this anguished memorial to the 20,000
Polish officers and intelligentsia who were murdered by the Soviets in 1941.  (Wajda’s father was one of them.)  Not only an extraordinary film but a moving
memorial.  (3/18/09)

Song of the
Sparrows.  A touching comedy about an Iranian man beset with accidents, including
the loss of his job, his beloved daughter’s loss of her hearing aid, and his
misadventures in trying to help her. Touching, funny, so warm that it becomes a
kind of international story.  (5/6/09)

Stanley Kauffmann is The New Republic's film critic.

By Stanley Kauffmann

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