Adam Nayman
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.
As the rare prequel to justify its existence, Rise of the Planet of the Apes demanded a follow-up, and the result is an evolutionary curiosity: a film that is at once markedly superior and considerably less satisfying than its predecessor.
The show can be pathologically watchable when it dispenses with any pretenses to urban anthropology and plunges into its characters’ headspaces. Sometimes, the show’s depths are kiddie-pool shallow, but occasionally, as in “One Man’s Trash,” there’s a bit of an undertow.
Nymphomaniac is something of a sarcastic thumbs-up for Lars the iconoclast: its scenario of a woman narrating her own erotic awakening—which then turns into a kind of all-night bender, spanning decades and the best body-and-soul baring efforts of two actresses—is easily seen as a sort of run-on director’s commentary track.
It’s a fine irony that a movie so determined to satirically skewer groupthink has generated so much of it.
It’s possible to detect more than a few hints of detachment or even derision in the way that Gloria treats its protagonist, but Garcia’s performance stands up against these moments in the screenplay in a way that creates genuine friction—the fraught quality that generally makes for worthwhile filmmaking.
Based loosely on the true story of an FBI operation targeting public corruption, American Hustle is basically a less exotic, polyester-clad doppelganger for Argo—a lushly produced, seventies-inflected crowd-pleaser about a showbiz-style sting.
A Few Great Pumpkins
The Tenant; Burn, Witch, Burn; Tourist Trap; Trilogy of Terror; Ganja and Hess; Dead of Night; The Blair Witch Project
Three movies into his second career as a feature filmmaker, McQueen has leveraged his obvious skills as an installation artist into becoming the modern master of a certain kind of set piece—the literal show-stopper, in which the movie grinds to a halt to beg our applause.
In addition to being the most visually striking of Anderson’s six movies to date, There Will Be Blood might be the most visually striking American feature of the last decade. Or two, or three.
If Only God Forgives has anything going for it, it’s that it’s clearly the movie that its creator wanted to make. Of course, that’s also mostly what’s wrong with it.
"I made this film because people have been making fun of the seventies. And I think that’s because the dreams people had at that time are still considered a threat. I would never make fun of kids who rejected the material values of the world, and who considered that life was about some sort of political or spiritual path."
Something in the Air is indeed a little anodyne, a bit blandly lovely both in its casting and in its seventies-inflected cinematography. It’s also fleet and fluid, which are welcome qualities and recognizable hallmarks of Assayas’s cinema over the years to boot.
In lieu of stylistic fireworks or some sort of grand thesis statement, Piñeiro offers us nothing less than a window on extreme beauty, which radiates through the faces of his actresses and the Shakespeare plays that they intermittently recite in a variety of contexts.