Reviews
What has not changed, despite the shift into genre, is the commitment to helping us sympathize with damaged, alienating (and alienated) people. In his films we might feel the discomfort of self-recognition from these characters, while in all but the finest horror films, their predicament is usually reduced to a motive for a reign of bloody terror.
An occasional tin ear for old-guy dialogue suggests Linklater might still be more comfortable with the casual-philosophical badinage of those a decade or more his junior, but the 12-year gestation gives the film the distance crucial to its angry, sad, but, in hindsight, wise perspective on the early Iraq War years.
Gerwig evokes that specifically senior-year feeling of the rapid approach of adulthood through a swift editing style, offering a dynamic rhythm that conjures the sense of finite time she has with family and friends, a patchwork of energetic montages propelling Christine and the story forward.
In a film like The Work, with its multiple layers of privileged access and precariously obtained permissions from an array of potentially volatile participants, you are not just being allowed to see. Your sight is essential. Seeing and being seen is the point.
There is a nervous breakdown at its center, not necessarily by its protagonist but by the norms and institutions that sustain him. A lacerating critique of liberal cosmopolitanism, The Square is at once an art-house provocation of supreme calculation and a guttural sob for an unhappy West.
Robin Campillo himself was a participant in ACT UP-Paris in his younger days, and the easy jockeying between strategy and action in the film would likely have been near impossible without his insider perspective.
Here, queerness is not figured along the lines of sexual orientation or gender identity so much as the otherness that comes with being differently abled and, even more immediately, with a sense of loss.
A Gentle Creature is more of a destabilizing shock to the system than a call to arms, a confrontation with a broken state rather than a blueprint to rebuild it. It confirms Loznitsa as a master craftsman of the impeccably designed and crafted hellscape, politically charged and all-consuming.
Meyerowitz splits the tonal difference between his kinder Greta Gerwig collaborations (Frances Ha, Mistress America) and the more acerbic works surrounding those, dealing with the previously unlikely possibility of forgiveness and healing.
The disconnect between the liberated shooting and editing style and the social entrapment actually experienced by its characters gives The Florida Project its indeterminate feel and ungainly shape.
Set in one location and trotting out a cast of five, Abundant Acreage Available is as lean and concise as its title is long and lumbering. MacLachlan first came to our attention as the screenwriter of Junebug, a lovely portrait of the tensions that bind a family.
Aronofsky piles on incidents (rather than plot), bodies (rather than characters), until what once had the potential to be a pastoral paradise has become a writhing, grasping, cluttered Bosch-like abyss.
Their contrivance is based on philosophical truths about human behavior, combined with faith in their audiences to distill truth from fiction. Their cinema presents an almost constant dialogue between the mundane and the colossal.
Nocturama is up to many things, perhaps including taking the piss, and it is not always easy to disentangle its aims.