My precise view

https://ift.tt/3aRKsK4 Though some filmmakers might insist you can make a film about a hot-button issue like the refugee crisis, in the end you can only make films about people. Limbo, the second feature from Scottish director Ben Sharrock, is about people who happen to be refugees, a group of young men from various nations who have been given temporary shelter on a remote Scottish island as they wait to see if they’ve been granted asylum. Their housing, a nest of nondescript little cottages, bears a handmade sign that reads REFUGEES WELCOME with a heart appended. Some of the locals do welcome them with well-meaning but misguided enthusiasm (by offering, for instance, a clumsy “cultural awareness” course that’s designed to indoctrinate the newcomers to western ways but succeeds only in bewildering them), while others, particularly the local teenagers, inflict indifferent hostility. To the islanders, all of the men are outsiders, strangers from other lands. But they’re also ou...

https://ift.tt/333359w The third season of The Girlfriend Experience begins with a job interview in virtual space. In a bare, glowing white room, Iris (a supple yet self-possessed Julia Goldani Telles of The Affair ) explains to a glamorous older woman that she’s abandoning an elite undergraduate education in the States for a new life in London. Beyond a few unnerving details—sometimes the women speak without moving their lips—the meeting only seems remarkable, after a year when more people than ever were communicating mostly via technology, in the context of a show about high-end sex workers. What the protagonists of this Steven Soderbergh movie turned Starz anthology, whose alternately enthralling, stimulating and sluggish first new episodes since 2017 premiere on May 2, have in common is that each exchanges intimate physical contact for money. Just before she clinches the gig with an exclusive escort service, Iris explains what she has to offer along with her milky ski...

https://ift.tt/3nBlyn4 A few Saturdays ago, a charming teacher asked Katherine Palmer, 64, on a date at a local tavern. After a year of staying six feet apart from others, meeting up outside and wearing face masks, spending time with someone in person made her nervous at first. However, as she she started to relax into the date, she began to realize something else: they were hitting it off. Now that she’s fully vaccinated, she says, she’s ready to put her worries aside and put herself out there. Palmer says the pandemic made her recognize that, when it comes to finding love again, there’s no time to waste. “When your husband dies, you realize life is short,” she says. “That part was definitely missing: to have somebody by your side during a pandemic that you could talk to and, you know, tell them, ‘I’m afraid about what happened today,’ and they would console you. I missed all that with my husband not being here…So maybe I want another one.” Pandemic-era dating has been h...

https://ift.tt/3gNqLXD Paula wakes up in her bus around 4:30 a.m. most days. She can usually still see the stars. She works for a few hours, often on freelance projects using her training as a biologist, and makes breakfast when her 12-year-old son Max gets up around 7:00. (TIME has agreed to grant Paula and Max pseudonyms out of concerns for their safety.) She feeds their dog and cat, and then she and Max, who is on the autism spectrum, begin homeschooling. They follow specialized, skills-based lesson plans to keep his work short and consistent—at least two to three hours a day, seven days a week. By 10:00, they usually “hit the ground running” on renovating their bus, she says. They try to complete one project a day, big or small. Paula, 39, and Max have lived in their 35-foot skoolie—a term for school buses which have been renovated into small mobile homes—for nearly a year, often traveling across public Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in Arizona, California, Nevad...