Manuel Betancourt: Last News

Manuel Betancourt “The Sand Castle” is made up of intentionally simple elements: an abandoned island, a creaky old lighthouse, an intermittently working radio. And at its center is a family of four: a doting mother, a resourceful father, a moody teen son and a daydreaming daughter. Their survival depends on the increasingly Sisyphean task of waiting and scavenging, hoping and praying.

Matt Minton mminton@variety.com Ahead of the Oscar nominations being announced Jan. 23, where “Waves” is hoping for recognition after being shortlisted for Best International Film, it led the pack this past week at the Czech Lion Awards — Czech Republic’s equivalent of the Academy Awards — with 14 nominations.

Manuel Betancourt On Oct. 1, 1942, a Japanese freighter carrying over 1,800 British POWs captured during the Battle of Hong Kong was torpedoed by an American sub. The chaos that followed — wherein members of the Japanese army shot any prisoner aiming to swim to safety while a slew of fishing boats helped in their rescue — resulted in more than 800 of those British soldiers dying.

Manuel Betancourt The 21st century cheerleader is an athlete unlike any other. With a wide-eyed grin, flashy makeup and a glittering bow to match, she is required to be sturdy yet feminine; pliant yet steely. In “Backspot,” D.W.

Manuel Betancourt From “Kramer vs Kramer” to “Marriage Story,” Hollywood has offered no shortage of compelling tales about how divorce has a way of souring relationships — how, by their very nature, divorces dredge up the ugliest in people, making petty marital grievances balloon into resentful chasms that risk making the very process unbearable in ways both emotional and logistic. With “Our Son,” writer-director Bill Oliver (2018’s “Jonathan”) is adding an LGBTQ entry into that cinematic canon. And while this New York City-set divorce drama offers enough modern tweaks on a well-worn narrative, its emotional resonance remains elusive, muted even.

Manuel Betancourt The toxicity of patriarchal masculinity has become such a well-worn trope in pop culture (and especially in recent Colombian cinema) that it’s hard to remember its effects continue unabated in streets and households all over the world, and in that Latin American country specifically. And so, while Fabián Hernández’s central concerns in his simply-titled film, “A Man” (“Un Varón”), are all too familiar, his tale of a young man living in a shelter in the center of Bogotá who cannot escape the violence of the world of the streets around him, emerges nonetheless as a powerful portrait of the country’s inescapable machismo.

Manuel Betancourt “Only the optimist commits suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists.” The Emil Cioran line, introduced in the first scene of Sebastián Silva’s morbid black comedy “Rotting in the Sun,” initially feels like the key to understanding the Chilean filmmaker’s latest endeavor. “The others,” the quote continues, “having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?” More than merely placing suicide at the heart of Silva’s fictionalized take on himself, the quote’s pop intellectualism sets the tone for what soon becomes, in true Silva fashion, an absurdist meditation on death wishes, social media influencers (the film stars Jordan Firstman, also as himself) and 21st-century nihilism.

Manuel Betancourt “Victoria’s Secret for men.” That’s how International Male, the clothing catalogue founded by Gene Burkard is described in the opening moments of Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed’s “All Man: The International Male Story.” Only the description should have an important caveat: This smorgasbord of images of men in the sexy (if aggressively outrageous) outfits that adorned Burkard’s 1976 creation were aimed at a specific subset of men. Telling a straightforward tale about this queer-skewing business, “All Man” opens up inquiries on how masculinity has been packaged for the American consumer, straight and gay alike.The comparison to Victoria’s Secret is an apt one, capturing the way the many talking heads that populate “All Man” speak to and understand Burkard’s goals and ambitions.

Manuel Betancourt “When you become a mother, you feel like you are split in two,” a character says late in Michelle Garza Cervera’s “Huesera.” The words are supposed to be comforting, a reminder that the physical and emotional toll the pregnancy is taking on young Valeria (Natalia Solien) is not just natural, but expected. “And just wait for when you’re in labor! You’ll literally feel like your bones are breaking!” By the time the audience hears those words, it’s clear this Mexican body horror film is mining such fears in very literal ways for what’s a haunting and probing story about the horrors of motherhood.Pregnancy, as it turns out, has made Valeria lose her bearings. She does in fact feel split in two and images and sounds of broken bones haunt her wherever she goes.

Manuel Betancourt A man is standing still, facing the camera. He wears a construction hat and a neon safety vest over a bulletproof one.