THE GOOD, THE NOT SO BAD AND THE UGLY: AFI Films, Part I-The Clan, Mustang and Son of Saul

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Warning: SPOILERS

saul twoAs regular as Thanksgiving, the AFI Film Festival has come and gone. And as regular as Thanksgiving, I over gorged myself.

This year I actually did rather well. Out of the thirteen, count ‘em, thirteen movies I saw, six I would highly recommend, five I felt were okay, and two I thought to be absolutely abysmal

Three of the films are currently a country’s entry in the Foreign Language Film Category for the Academy Awards: The Clan from Argentina; Mustang from France; and Son of Saul from Hungary.

The Clan is a crime film with slight, and in my opinion, not enough, overtones of a political drama.

Based on a true story, written by Julian Loyola, Esteban Student and the director Pablo Trapero (he also directed Caroncho, which was Argentine’s 2011 entry for the Oscars), the film tells the story of the Puccio family. The pater familias, Arquimedes, once worked for the secret police, the ones responsible for making the word “disappeared” into a noun by adding a “the” to the front of it. Read the rest of this entry »