Maestro (M18)
129 minutes, available on Netflix, 4 stars
Leonard Bernstein was a colossus of 20th-century American culture, a conductor with the New York Philharmonic at 25 and composer of operas, symphonies and the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story.
His prodigious creativity is ungraspable, and so Maestro is not about his music – despite being scored entirely by his compositions – but a biopic of Bernstein as an equally legendary bon vivant.
For his second round as star-director and co-writer, American actor Bradley Cooper orchestrates an overview of Bernstein’s life and loves.
Cooper’s striking physical and vocal likeness encompasses this carnal vitality.
Bernstein loved company, male and female. His great love, though, was his wife and mother of his three children, Costa Rican actress Felicia Montealegre (played by an incandescent Carey Mulligan).
The movie is a three-decade chronicle of their complicated relationship, dating from their first flirtation at a 1946 New York party. Mulligan’s display of toughness and fragility is a tour de force.
Migration (PG)
92 minutes, now showing, 3 stars
Illumination – the American studio behind the Despicable Me (2010 to 2017) and Sing (2016 and 2021) franchises – may not be an animation brand as well-known as Walt Disney Pictures or Pixar, but the company’s blockbuster streak is unassailable.
In this story, the Mallard family of migratory ducks convinces its anxious father to set out on an epic vacation. The well-hatched plan quickly goes awry.
Pre-teen audiences will be tickled by cute, comical critters and relatable family dynamics.
The Mallard dad (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani) is overprotective, unlike mum (Elizabeth Banks). She shares their adolescent son (Caspar Jennings) and duckling daughter’s (Tresi Gazal) desire for discovery.
There are spills, thrills and merry antics as the Mallards’ daring mission to free a caged Jamaican parrot (Keegan-Michael Key) runs a-fowl of a demon chef arch-nemesis (Boris Rehlinger).
Taxi Tehran (PG)
82 minutes, 4 stars
What happens when a film-maker is banned from making films? He drives a taxi, but turns the experience into a movie.
In this 2015 film, winner of the Golden Bear top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, Iranian dissident writer-director Jafar Panahi gets behind the wheel of a cab.
He picks up passengers representing a cross-section of Teheran society. By interacting with them, their hopes and problems are revealed. A dash camera captures the action. Most of the passengers are non-professional actors playing themselves, giving the film a powerful sense of authenticity.
Taxi Tehran has been called a “docu-fiction”, a work that blends scripted and unscripted segments. For example, among his passengers is human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, on her way to meet a political prisoner.
Throughout, no one addresses Panahi’s real-life plight – at the time, he had been under a ban for almost two decades – but almost every conversation alludes to it. He smiles and nods, in a kind of extended inside joke that would be funny, if it were not so tragic.
Taxi Tehran has been brought back to the big screen to mark the ninth anniversary of independent cinema The Projector, along with other top-grossing works.
Where: Levels 5 and 6 Cineleisure, 8 Grange Road; 05-00 Golden Mile Tower, 6001 Beach Road
MRT: Somerset and Nicoll Highway
When: From Jan 5, various timings
Tickets: $10.50 for standard weekday tickets, $15 for standard weekend tickets
Info: str.sg/igZh
