Adam Nayman
It’s not just that Westerberg’s songs are featured on the soundtrack: their winning mixture of cynicism and earnestness becomes the voice inside the movie’s head.
Sicario is a film that rather decadently allows itself to get caught up in the machinations of its American or American-affiliated characters while Mexico looms in the background as an (immaculately photographed) abattoir.
“It’s hard to be direct. For me, when things are direct, they make me start to think of other forms of media, like literature, or a scholarly paper. For me, film is different. It’s something that stirs curiosity or emotions, and it’s only later that you discover what was underneath—or maybe not!”
Sean Baker makes widescreen movies. Not only in the sense that he employs a rectangular aspect ratio, but also by seeking to include as many characters as possible within the physical area of a shot.
In trying to figure out how The Princess of France can be as phenomenally accomplished as Viola while also a bit less immediately appealing, it may be best to defer to the Bard: the play’s the thing.
”When I was starting to make Eden, people told me that my main character was too passive or too negative; when you write scripts and try to get financing, that’s the sort of thing that you’re told not to do, or that people don’t want to see that. People said that it should be a success story.”
Like Olivier Assayas in Something in the Air, Hansen-Love is smart enough to show that adolescent collectives are at least as much about the rush of experiencing something—be it a rave or a protest rally—in close physical proximity to one’s peers as the thing itself.
Each of these set pieces is superbly executed within Andersson’s trademark long-take style, and the dichotomies they set up—between past and present, reality and fantasy, and comedy and melancholy—are potent and suggestive. They are all also basically copies of scenes that the director has done before.
The social commentary here is broad, earnest, and welcome; the trick is that Miller and his cowriters have found a way to work these loftier concerns into what is basically an extended, 120-minute chase sequence, and to generate images that speak eloquently in the absence of dialogue.
“I like the title because it puts you in the space of a legend, one of those cities like El Dorado. Maybe we think we’re in something more like a fairy tale, or a fabula. The film doesn’t exist. It’s not real. It’s been created. I like the film in that place.”
It’s merely a matter of circumstance that Shane was the first movie to get stretched out against its will, but it gives the film a double place in both film history and more specifically the history of the Western, as a movie widely regarded to be a thoroughbred of its genre was also a kind of guinea pig.
The best-known member of the cohort represented in New York is Kazik Radwanski, whose debut Tower (2012) showed at dozens of film festivals around the world and garnered critical praise commensurate with his level of formal accomplishment, which is high indeed.
It’s impossible to consider L’il Quinquin as anything other than an auteur work, which is why its reception as a detour of sorts is a little misleading. For all that Dumont does differently here, he also stays resolutely on track.
A Most Violent Year is Chandor’s most intricately scripted and assertively directed film yet, even if all he’s really asserting is a preference for the Sort of Movies That They Don’t Make Anymore.
On stage, Into the Woods is intimate despite its sprawling cast of characters. Onscreen, though, it feels desperately dispersed and that sense of visual displacement gradually affects the thematic and emotional continuity between the different storylines.
Christopher Nolan usually makes movies about characters who are prisoners of their own devices, which makes Interstellar a departure. This time out, a protagonist’s single-minded obsession leads him to liberation rather than entrapment.
A Few Great Pumpkins
Isle of the Dead, Twilight Zone: the Movie, Eyes Without a Face, Candyman, Night of the Demon, Black Sunday, The Babadook
Scorsese’s twelfth and greatest feature, adapted from Wiseguy, a mob-tell all narrated by stoolie Henry Hill to novelist Nicholas Pileggi, casts a long, enveloping shadow over the past twenty-five years’ worth of studio, independent, and television productions from the U.S. and elsewhere.
Men, Women & Children begins in deep space, with images of the Voyager space probe twirling serenely underneath a crisp, omniscient, scene-setting voiceover by Emma Thompson. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey mashed up with Barry Lyndon.
To the list of hardy souls who have tried bringing Cormac McCarthy to the screen we may now add James Franco.