Reviews
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.
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?
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.
If Hong is indeed the best that we have got, there is something troubling about this fact. For it should detract nothing from the integrity of his body of work to say that, when taken altogether, it is a quintessential expression of a cinema of disappointment and diminished expectations.
Even the most resourceful, imaginative filmmaker would be hard-pressed to redeem the screenplay, specifically the lengths to which Cody goes to disguise the true nature of the story, and also the underlying reasons for the charade, which are unconvincing and in bad faith.
That Denis can produce a work that, without a trace of preciousness, is equal parts indebted to Barthes and Chicago blues, connected as arm is to shoulder to the film-historical legacy of post-New Wave French filmmaking, is only further justification for claim that the 71-year-old is the greatest working director over the last two decades.
Though it bears the markings of a gut-wrenching horror film, A Quiet Place is stubbornly optimistic about the existing order.
“It is a time when this country is under a lot of criticism, rightly so, and I have found my place in portraying certain things, but showing them to you in a way that you get to make your own judgment. And so far, I have been very moved that people want to see the good of this country.”