“The Last King of Scotland”
This Academy Award-nominated 2006 British film is based on Giles Foden’s award-winning debut novel of the same name. It was adapted by screenwriters Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock, and directed by Kevin MacDonald. The movie at last gives the vast talents of Forest Whitaker their proper due. Long-relegated to bit parts, Whitaker dominates the role of Ugandan President Idi Amin. The notorious dictator befriends a young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan. The doctor initally ignores the crimes Amin is committing across the country but he is forced to acknowledge their reality when a comment of his leads Amin to kill the health minister. The skilled directing offers a powerful indictment of the West’s complicity in Africa’s problems.—Sascha Brodsky
“Volver”
There is something so familiar about the characters in “Volver.” Though the plot, which converges around the cover-up of an accidental murder, may be completely foreign to the ordinary movie-goer, director Pedro Almodóvar masterfully stirs an emotional connection that transcends culture, class, and circumstance. “Volver” (Spanish for “to return”) set in Madrid, Spain, centers on a seemingly average family with some very dark secrets. Raimunda, played impeccably by Penelope Cruz, is a mother struggling to make ends meet with no help from her unemployed, beer-guzzling husband, who constantly casts seamy glances at their fourteen-year-old daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo). In the eerie opening scene Raimunda, and her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) are shown polishing their parents’ headstones at a cemetery in the provincial town of La Mancha. As the legend goes, the ill winds in the town are guilty of spreading flash fires, like the one that killed Raimunda’s parents four years prior. This scene foreshadows the journey to come—there will be two more bodies to bury, and one that magically comes back to life. It is not however the story that makes this film, but the wind that weaves through it. With “Volver,” Almodóvar is saying something big.—Anusha Alikhan
