Michael Koresky
There’s really only one thing you need to know about Albert Nobbs: that it was a long-gestating dream project for Glenn Close.
In this follow-up to Marshall’s similar ensemble romcom from 2010, Valentine’s Day, a bedridden Robert De Niro’s dying wish, croaked out of the side of his mouth in the manner of his Flawless stroke victim, is to be allowed onto the roof of his New York City hospital so he can see that precious ball drop one last time.
Everyone seems to understand the basic concept about Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Jake La Motta: that it’s a sports picture blown up into tragic opera, a film about a small (and often, as depicted, small-minded) person who somehow attains mythic grandeur.
It’s a film that is a proclamation as much as it is a movie, a cause as much as an entertainment: this is cinema, it says, don’t let it die.
Steve McQueen’s Shame is the latest entry in what we’ll call the sad sex subgenre. In a sad sex film, partners don’t enjoy each other’s flesh, they rut. They bump uglies. They shudder. Their faces evince no enjoyment as their bodies try to make contact. Sometimes they cry during orgasm.
Thus we get chestnuts such as “A family seems like an archipelago” and “What is it that makes the women in my life want to destroy themselves?” These lines undermine rather than deepen a character who’s richest when Payne and Clooney feel most ambivalent about him.
How are movies meant to be watched? The question inevitably, frustratingly, then raises a second question: What is a movie?
The Masque of the Red Death, Lost Highway, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, Kill List, The Howling, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fear(s) of the Dark
The Shining turned out to be, paradoxically, Kubrick’s most controlled and most chaotic film, an exquisite structure that finally busts apart, as though with an axe.
As he proved in Bad Education, Volver, and especially Broken Embraces, Almodóvar has grown increasingly lousy with exposition. Once the back story starts coming fast and furious here, the film is helplessly revealed as a precarious structure—which it needn’t have been.
The fact that such a heavily allegorical, narratively tricky film would incite anger is a testament to the inherent power of Loznitsa’s imagery; the cumulative impact of My Joy’s many jarring episodes announces him as a potentially major filmmaker.
For our thirtieth symposium, we asked our writers to consider at length the movie that they believe to be the worst in a single filmmaker’s career. However, “worst” could be applied in any way our writers interpreted it.
If Weekend felt at all like a treatise on the State of Being Gay Now the easygoing charm that makes it so special would have been obscured.
There’s a voiceover buzzing through Alexei Fedorchenko’s brief, impressionistic, and sentimental Silent Souls, and it’s eager to tell you how to absorb what you’re watching.
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu—a thrilling three-hour whirlwind through tumultuous late twentieth-century Romanian history that focuses exclusively on the deposed president and tyrant—reminds us that the public face is often all we are privileged to see.
It was made right in that not-so-sweet spot in the middle of the decade, when audiences refused to see anything that didn’t feature Julie Andrews spinning on a mountaintop and when producers were trying to appeal to younger, more progressive audiences without giving up on their waning stars and once tried-and-true formulas.
Colin Farrell, first appearing on his front lawn in a seductive glower and matching black tank-top, is a vamp of the highest order—the role gives the Irishman a chance to strut his sundry stuff; his sexy swagger and comic chops are both on full view.
It’s clear that Ruiz wishes to envelop the viewer in lush, traditional storytelling; this being wily Ruiz, though, Mysteries of Lisbon foregrounds that storytelling to a nearly absurd degree.
The terror of teenhood is in full flower in Azazel Jacobs’s alternately disarming and discomfiting Terri. Mostly gone is the (intentionally) coddling warmth of Jacobs’s breakout, the melancholic and marvelously musty Momma’s Man.
Most damning, though, is that the film refuses to answer the one basic question that must have come to mind for anyone who watched even the trailer: What’s her story?