The Childhood of a Leader (September 15th and 17th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER screens Thursday September 15th at 8:40 pm and Saturday September 17th at 8:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

Like Quentin Tarantino's recent film THE HATEFUL EIGHT, THE CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER is presented as an old-school road show epic. It opens with a tense overture showing the end of WWI, including lots of shots of grateful Europeans holding up “vive Wilson” signs. The overture culminates in our first glimpse of the future despot of the title, Prescott (Tom Sweet), dressed as an angel for a church Christmas play. But this child is anything but angelic. More like a bad seed.

This is followed by a seemingly casual scene in which two men, one of them the boy's father (Liam Cunningham), play pool while having a philosophical discussion that lays out the film's themes. The younger man (Robert Pattinson) argues that the tragedy of the recently ended great war occurred because, “not that one man had the courage to be evil, but that so many have not the courage to be good.”

The Rover

Review by Pamela Zoslov

About midway through THE ROVER, the dystopian Australian feature film by David Michôd, a mentally challenged character named Rey says, “Not everything has to be about somethin'.”


That pretty much sums up the storytelling philosophy of Michôd and his co-scenarist, Joel Edgerton. It's as empty narratively as its post-apocalyptic desert landscape. The film is set in a bleak, battered Australian outback “ten years after the collapse,”presumably the worldwide economic kind. People from all over the world have moved to Oz and are living in armed, paranoid survival mode, The American dollar, surprisingly, is the only currency they trade. (The obvious resemblance to MAD MAX, by the way, was rejected by Michôd, who said, a little hubristically, "You put cars in the desert in Australia and people are going to think of MAD MAX, and with all due respect to that film... I think THE ROVER is going to be way more chillingly authentic and menacing.")