Reviews
The premise serves as a malleable metaphor: the white coopting of black cool, cited as one of the reasons for the selection of exclusively black targets; the ongoing use of unwilling black bodies to perform white labor from plantation to penitentiary; and the pressures of conformity borne by the blacks living among white affluence.
There are pretty pictures, some interesting in broad-stroke conception, that are nonetheless leeched of those intangible qualities that would lend them genuine grandeur and thematic heft. As a result, they just sit there, heavy on the eyes, light on the heart and mind.
With the tone and care of the genuinely righteous, his voice was that of a herald, with writing that sliced through hypocrisy and the specific, tragic banality of American life with a swift condemnation that managed to touch the sublime.
There is high public interest in stand-up comedy, evidenced by the popularity of Louie, The Aristocrats . . . the ability of comics like Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer to make headlines and the preponderance of specials on streaming services like Netflix. But the subject has been a hard nut for narrative features to crack.
The opening scene of The Lure cleverly reverses the age-old relationship between sirens and their prey. It hints that it is the fishtailed siblings who are being musically mesmerized, rather than the other way around.
Staying Vertical is an aggressively conceptual cycle-of-life saga that brings the director back to his earlier model, in which characters ramble through a freeform narrative with no fidelity to logic.
The deft deployment of overt symbolism, coupled with an empathetic attention to the emotional travails of the characters, allows the film to operate equally well as a theologic parable, an existential comedy, and an anachronistic family drama.
If good art has to on some level be working against something then lately Jarmusch, with this film and Only Lovers Left Alive, seems to be valiantly fighting time and tide. In his ever gentle way, he has found a new urgency.
As Bening plays her, Dorothea is sarcastic and salty in one scene, deeply serious in the next. She is prone to speaking in hoary neologisms, dispensing wisdom when no one asked for it.
The ability of director Maren Ade to wring, in precise order and proportion, moments of amazement, humiliation, fear, guilt, longing, acceptance, and, above all, catharsis, out of the material in the final stretch verges on authentic genius.
The distance between what Affleck imagines his screen presence to be and what it in fact is constitutes a yawning gorge in Live by Night, and free-falling through this vast, cavernous space you can find a few fleeting moments of giddy pleasure before the final thud.
I, Daniel Blake is a film not about injustice (which we can all read about), but about hardship (which we do not) and how its victims cope with it. We are never allowed to forget the inhumane backdrop, via the mind-numbing repetition of ghastly, subliterate welfare terminology.
His output in the decade since Volver (2006), from Broken Embraces to The Skin I Live In to I’m So Excited, has lacked the charge and spontaneity of his finest work. Julieta has awoken him from this recent stupor.
The padre and the psychopath are figures situated at either end of his career, but as they gaze at their reflections, they also mirror one another: one can find within these two very different films the parallel plights of men in the midst of desperate introspection.