About a young Iranian man in Denmark looking for a wifely stand-in to solidify his residency, The Charmer is itself a charming film that chooses to reveal all the complexities of this man’s circumstances slowly, shrewdly, one facet at a time. This method of refusing to disclose the full extent of the main character’s circumstances—as for instance its choosing to…
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Its star a decidedly pudgier character than that of his bravura bad-boy role as a high-school truant, Election finds in Matthew Broderick the perfect hypocrite. And yet every main character in the film exhibits this same hypocrisy, just to different degrees. And so he’s far from alone—he just happens to be helming the ship. Election can sometimes be entertaining, even…
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Opening with a pertinent but in-plain-sight quote from The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen, in whose play a character forbiddingly refers to the dread of letting in the so-called young people, While We’re Young tries to bring to its thematic elements a coherence and a sense of character that should be the preserve of a more textured and multifarious film.…