Were Evangeline more sympathetic and self-aware, we might ask ourselves how our enjoyment of Howard is so different from hers of Madeline, and how our continued appetite for performances of female psychological fracture fits into a history of condescension and exploitation.
It is a playful thing, rattling with little bibelots, and this is for the good, for we could use more games amid the self-serious heft of so much contemporary cinema.
Cinema like architecture is an art concerned with grace, proportion, and a mindfulness of human needs, things which become increasingly difficult to control or bear in mind as size and budget metastasize.
The basic material of BlacKkKlansman is custom-made to be described as provocative, even though it is hard to pick out a moment in the finished film that would possibly provoke or discomfit someone already inclined to buy a ticket to a Spike Lee movie called BlacKkKlansman.
Akhavan is fascinated by the moment of seduction, like the precise tipping point when a playful kick turns into a nudging invitation. She is also interested in the moment when the spell breaks.
Filling the big screen canvas with the small-screen desktop space, Unfriended: Dark Web is cinema for the age of the post-cinematic affect.
Will is affected by not just PTSD but also a self-serving, deluded masculinity that is killing his relationship with the only person he has in this world. The central, intentional frustration of the film stems from our desire to see them stay together, even as he is denying his daughter the life and community she so desperately needs and craves.
It contains a crowd-pleaser dance-off, and not one, but two Viagra jokes . . . Did you know it is possible to mist up and roll your eyes at the same time?
Is Putin the cause or the result of Russia’s systemic ills? A tentative answer might be found in the Russian cinema of the 21st century, which, as it happens, coincides with the beginning and ongoing rule of this postmodern tsar.
Two halves form a harmonious whole in Feast of the Epiphany, the new feature from Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert and longtime RS staff writer Farihah Zaman. Feast made its world premiere on June 23 at BAMcinemaFest 2018. More showtimes and more festivals to come.
The super-fan has progressed to secretary, then understudy, then professional and romantic usurper. Six years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, All About Eve tapped a rich vein of existential panic tied to the theme of replication and replaceability.
Araby is a film in the form of an inquest, a postmortem investigation, searching for the key to unlock an extinguished existence, as though any one thing could suffice to explain a death, much less a life.
Writer/director Jim McKay’s fifth feature, and his first since 2005’s Angel Rodriguez, is his most tightly plotted film yet, propelled by a momentum that’s often exhilaratingly fleet. Yet his emphasis on his characters’ everyday stakes keeps the film from feeling lightweight.
A very good actor who has in recent years grown into a great one, Hawke gives an extraordinarily controlled performance as a man struggling mightily to retain dominion over himself.
We are becoming numb, and nothing can shock or affect us anymore. So how do you make an erotic scene that allows us to feel again, to feel the pain, the beauty, the urgency, the desperation, and the deep, animalistic but also spiritual connection between these two women?