Reviews
I will never understand those hostile responses to Malick, which seem determined to hold the line so that American narrative cinema will not be overrun by avant-garde abstraction, as though there was a flotilla of directors making experimental films on this scale instead of literally just one guy.
The miracle of the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul—certainly among our greatest living filmmakers—is that he has used film to allow us to see through his eyes: maybe the highest compliment one can pay to a maker of moving images.
It’s like a cautionary bedtime story told to seventeenth-century American tots by cruel parents tucking them in at night as the wind howls outside the door.
Abound with lush, multilayered imagery shot in black-and-white super 35, Embrace of the Serpent subverts time and space while mostly staying grounded in the primordial world of the Amazon jungle.
The main characters move inexorably, helplessly toward disillusionment and alienation even as they seem to be always standing in more or less the same spot: at the edge of a precipice.
Even those who reject their work on the grounds of temperament (snarky), ideology (right-leaning), or repetitiveness (guilty as charged) must concede the sheer, bristling cleverness of their choices as writers and directors.
When the camera slowly floats through communal areas, its relentless advance suggests menace; in close-ups the priests are pinned down with such entomological remorselessness that they nearly squirm.
It is as niche a production as you will see, bound to attract a handful of true believers and a good bit of eye-rolling opprobrium, in part because it is directly concerned with hetero white male angst, which is not precisely the flavor of the month.
His cinema is now one where only simple glances or gestures are necessary to convey multitudes. This kind of description has been applied to many filmmakers, but few directors are as pinpoint accurate as Garrel.
The plot of The Treasure revolves around people digging for riches in a backyard, lacking the means for more expansive adventures, and much of its humor derives from watching grown men bring their adult self-seriousness and anxiety to what is essentially a childhood pastime.
The evident work that went into rendering the details of every banal gesture complements the material, for crabbed Michael is a man for whom every piece of common courtesy is an agonizing chore.
Much of Where to Invade Next isn’t really that funny, as it mostly contains groaners straight out of the sort of “FWD: FWD: RE: BUSH JOKES” emails you’d see in your inbox circa 2003.
Movies are made of proven entities to minimize risk, but that transfers the stakes from making something good to making something that meets the expectations for what it is supposed to be.
Concussion hits the league surprisingly hard, actually; you don’t exit with a rosy view of the deceptive mega-corporation . . . If anything is soft in Concussion, it is the storytelling and conventionalism of the filmmaking.