Cinema Soul

Mustang , currently streaming on Netflix, is a coming of age drama about five sisters growing up in Turkey. While there is a good dose of humor throughout, Deniz Gamze Ergüven's film is clear eyed and unsentimental about the abuse and oppression that young women face in conservative religious societies. The sisters are orphans living in a rural area with their grandmother and their bachelor uncle. The film begins on the last day of school as Lale, the youngest sister, bids a tearful goodbye to her favorite teacher, who is moving to Istanbul. Istanbul serves as symbol of freedom, enlightenment, and salvation in the film, a promised land where the harsh religious reins of rural Turkey are loosed. Most of the film is from the point of view of  Lale. Throughout the movie the camera watches her watching; mostly watching her sisters as they sneak out of the house for secret trysts, parade about, and get pawned off in arranged marriages. Lale seems to know that there is a better...

In Spider-Man: Far From Home,  the teenage wall crawler leaves Queens behind and heads to Europe on a class trip. In Homecoming , Tom Holland's first go as the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, the emphasis was on the neighborhood. With it's corner bodegas and suburban enclaves that film was a pleasant reminder that there is more to New York City than midtown Manhattan. In one memorable scene a frustrated Spider-man has to run to save the day on foot, as there are no skyscrapers to swing from in Forest Park. Everything is on a larger scale this time around; both the scenery and the destruction. While the film often plays like a teenage romantic comedy from the 80s, the fact that our awkward lovestruck hero is secretly a web spinning Avenger is fair warning that this trip will be interrupted by large scale mayhem. The destruction is courtesy of four "elementals", cosmic beings from a parallel universe. They have already destroyed earth in that dimension an...