Reviews
As with Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, another masterpiece dedicated to present-day witnessing, to chasing the ghosts of atrocity across the living landscape of our ruined humanity, it’s important not to overlook the extraordinary artistry that allows for such extra-cinematic effects.
Sean Baker makes widescreen movies. Not only in the sense that he employs a rectangular aspect ratio, but also by seeking to include as many characters as possible within the physical area of a shot.
Magic Mike XXL is able to express something about catering to fantasy life with such clarity because it deals with the business of female fantasy—or, rather, the prepackaged version of female fantasy filtered through available cultural signs and symbols and enacted in the arena of the strip club.
In trying to figure out how The Princess of France can be as phenomenally accomplished as Viola while also a bit less immediately appealing, it may be best to defer to the Bard: the play’s the thing.
Whether a child will grasp this all enough for it to resonate is questionable, but adults are invited to reflect on their own lives, likely filled with crumbled islands, doors once open, shut, often cruelly, in our faces by fate, luck, our own weakness or inability. Life, suggests Inside Out, is destined to include disappointment.
Like Olivier Assayas in Something in the Air, Hansen-Love is smart enough to show that adolescent collectives are at least as much about the rush of experiencing something—be it a rave or a protest rally—in close physical proximity to one’s peers as the thing itself.
What rankles about The Tribe is that its trick (removing spoken language) is only clever enough to cover Slaboshpitsky’s vague faculty with his narrative elements for so long. It’s also a plodding, often crushingly boring watch.
For many of us, at some point in our upbringing, the movies variously played the part of babysitter, behavioral role model, playground inspiration, and substitute parent. For the six Angulo Brothers of the Lower East Side, stars of The Wolfpack, you might say that the movies were very nearly everything.
Each of these set pieces is superbly executed within Andersson’s trademark long-take style, and the dichotomies they set up—between past and present, reality and fantasy, and comedy and melancholy—are potent and suggestive. They are all also basically copies of scenes that the director has done before.
His latest film and fourth feature, Uncertain Terms, is perhaps Silver’s most mature depiction of imperfect love to date. As the title suggests, it focuses on relationships whose terms are in constant flux, setting its characters off on identity quests.
A compact 94 minutes, Heaven Knows What is a movie with feverish drive, dragged this way and that by Harley’s appetites and Ilya’s whim to carrot-on-a-stick her around with the promise of reciprocal affection. Throughout, the perspective commutes regularly between swooning intimacy and bystander detachment.
Tomorrowland is a folly and a failure, though there is something touching in its failure, tied as it is to the vision and personality of Walt Disney himself. No less than the Brook Farm and Oneida settlers, Disney was part of an American tradition of Utopian ambition.
There are easy jokes about academia ripe for the taking here, though L for Leisure mostly skips them; in fact, it often gives the sense of being too “mellow,” to borrow a word used prominently in the film, to bother with punchlines at all.
The social commentary here is broad, earnest, and welcome; the trick is that Miller and his cowriters have found a way to work these loftier concerns into what is basically an extended, 120-minute chase sequence, and to generate images that speak eloquently in the absence of dialogue.