Critic-8

Wonderful cinematography and landscapes dominate Sébastien Pilote's poignant, compelling, factually inspired, bittersweet, down-to-earth, well-acted,156-minute, 2021 film adapted from Louis Hémon's 1913 novel in which a pretty, headstrong 17-years-old (Sara Montpetit), who lives with her struggling, hardworking, homesteading parents (Sébastien Ricard and Hélène Florent) and five siblings (Arno Lemay, Thomas Haché, Charlotte Martin, Henri Picard, and Xavier Rivard-Désy) in rural northern Quebec, finds herself in 1900s being wooed by a woodsman and fur trapping guide (Émile Schneider), a nearby farmer (Antoine Olivier Pilon), and a well-to-do Massachusetts mill factory worker (Robert Naylor) and struggles with whom she will pick as her husband until a ser"ies of life-changing events occur.

After recklessly falling in love with the beautiful wife (Yoshira Escárrega) of a powerful, ruthless Mexican drug lord who heads up a drug cartel, escapes his fate due to a kindhearted henchman (Pedro Hernández), and then is determined to find his love when she disappears in Ivan Grbovic's engaging, poignant, award-winning, multilayered, well-acted, 105-minute, 2021 film highlighted by wonderful choreography using 35mm film, a tenacious, smitten Mexican migrant (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) takes a seasonal job working for a Canadian farmer (Claude Legault) and his adulterous wife (Hélène Florent), who have a rebellious teenage daughter (Marine Johnson), picking lettuce on the Bécotte vegetable farm in Quebec and then while researching for his love who he believes is in Montreal, gets mixed up with the discontented, estranged, unhappy family.

Jimmy Keyrouz's powerful, award-winning, factually inspired, moving, gut-wrenching, well-written, tension-filled, heartbreaking, violent, 110-minute, 2020 film based on his 2016 short movie Nocturne in Black in which a talented, endangered pianist (Tarek Yaacoub), who lives in a bombed-out building with his wannabe lawyer cousin (Sara Abi Kanaan) in a war-ravaged, ISIS-controlled Syrian town where music is forbidden, decides to fix his mother's bullet-ridden piano with the help of a Kurdish resistance soldier (Rola Beksmati) to sell to his shop owner boss (Mounir Maasri) to earn money to pay a smuggler so that he can hopefully twinkle the keys in an European orchestra and to help a resilient, orphaned boy (Ibrahim El Kurdi) have a life he deserves while working with the underground resistance to defeat terrorizing Islamist extremist fighters (Julian Farhat, et al.).