Reviews
Following high-wire walker Petit from France to New York City in his monomaniacal pursuit of his mad fantasy, the movie shares its subject’s single-minded dedication to the cause, and this lends it a propulsive momentum.
As Mizuki makes herself a small batch of pastries, each filled with gooey black sesame paste, the camera elegantly tilts away, revealing the space over her shoulder and above her head; it’s a movement implying omniscience and that something, perhaps of the malevolent variety, might lurk just out of our view.
Too often, the film indulges in a tedious solipsism and relies on the most hackneyed of coming-of-age tropes to inspire our pity for Aria.
Structurally, this is classic screwball material, and Maggie’s doomed-to-fail-but-also-kinda-succeed solution should be a hoot to watch unfold. Unfortunately it is not, and the reasons for this are almost too many to track.
An air of cool sophistication can hardly conceal the true geek-show nature of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy.
Gere’s performance, aggressively understated, is subtle to the point of nondescription. His character’s complexity is comprised entirely of a refusal to reveal anything at all, until it dawns on the viewer that this is because there is going to be nothing to reveal.
Though the film’s tonal range might be shifted toward the ambiguous and threatening, Perry’s dark humor remains in effect, and his characters’ ominously suggestive utterances harbor comic irony no less than menace.
In constructing his film in this fashion, Sauper reminds that “characters” are the provenance of fiction, while “people” should be the stuff of documentary films. Thus he doesn’t make an effort to stretch and shape his subjects’ lives to conform to preconceived narrative expectations.
Even if the film builds to a shrug, Baumbach is working at an increasingly sophisticated craft and dialogue level from moment to moment. Endless amounts of near-uniformly quotable dialogue come out at a clip only a shorthand writer could keep pace with.
In a moment when documentary film seems back under the thrall of all things cinema vérité, How to Smell a Rose is a terrific reminder that vérité is not merely the avoidance of interviewing subjects on camera, the eschewal of tripods and lighting, or acting the proverbial “fly on the wall.”
Were these poses merely all part of a larger, calculated performance Marlon gave in service of the role of his lifetime: that of “Brando”?
Phoenix is a gorgeously odd film, a quietly symphonic elegy fueled by a magnificently preposterous plot that ends up as something like a cross between Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli and Hitchcock’s Vertigo—but communicated through the specific experience of Jewish-German identity.
All plot synopses are necessarily attenuations, but for Horse Money any summary feels especially futile, or even violent, a crude reduction of its complex network of impossible geographies, fuzzy memories, and jumbled chronologies.
Woody Allen’s latest, Irrational Man, is, whether one accepts or rejects its brutal fatalism, a totalizing aesthetic experience that provides evidence that this seventy-nine-year-old is a craftsman we should still be paying attention to.