Weekend Highlights for L.A. International Film Festival
The American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival continues at the Cineplex Odeon Century Plaza Cinemas this weekend. Highlights from today’s and Sunday’s program follow.
SUNDAY
‘Discovery Program: Short Films’
United States, 1988, 136 minutes Noon Most impressive of the lot is “Private Debts,” from an O. Henry Prize-winning story and starring Sheila Kelley (of “Some Girls”) as a pregnant woman abandoned by her embezzling husband and forced to face the latent hostility of her rural community alone. The odd price she feels driven to pay, and her seeming willingness to pay it, is disturbing, even horrific. Yet the film has a casual, folksy tone--forcing viewers to interpret it either as outrageously misogynist cant or ironic feminist allegory. Given that the director, Nancy Cooperstein, is a woman, it seems more than safe to assume the latter. RECOMMENDED.
The best of the rest is “Mr. Fixit,” about a maritally troubled working-class husband who erects a wall in the middle of his home.
Only good movies
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