Reviews
If excess—visual and aural—is the melodrama’s stock-in-trade, Dominik Graf’s Beloved Sisters is an atypical example of the genre for the extent to which it is propelled by language.
The relentless repetition of the context (why the ballot is being held again), of Sandra’s plea, and of one question she frequently receives in response (“How many of the others have accepted to lose their bonus?”) approaches liturgy.
Reminiscent of Spielberg’s Lincoln in the way it limns the edges of its central great man by intensely focusing on practical matters—how, not just why, he forced and instituted political change—Selma is more procedural than biopic, although it doesn’t shy away from attempting nuanced, human portraiture.
Mr. Turner, an unconventional biopic of England’s most famous landscape painter from director Mike Leigh, does not endeavor to show the world as seen by Turner, but to show Turner in the world. It’s a movie about a man who isn’t particularly pretty—neither physically nor morally—but who produces beautiful things.
On stage, Into the Woods is intimate despite its sprawling cast of characters. Onscreen, though, it feels desperately dispersed and that sense of visual displacement gradually affects the thematic and emotional continuity between the different storylines.
Jackson’s at once digressive and bombastic style clearly grates for some. But there’s a singular earnestness and enthusiasm to these movies (as, too, to the Lord of the Rings films) that sets them apart from their many soulless imitators.
Maidan shows how documentary works at its best and most pure—assemblage and accrual. His vast shots are made for the cinema—they hold so your eye can roam at will.
It’s a production that required the full support of those titans of cultural conformity toward which Pynchon’s novels have long cast a wearily jaundiced eye. Return of the repressed or just further proof of the mainstream culture system’s massively absorptive qualities? Does it matter?
There are very few “cinematic” moves in Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie, but every last one lands like a blow, forces you to re-find your footing. Choices carry more weight when there are less of them, and Ullmann doesn’t make any of these choices lightly.
The Babadook takes the form of a somewhat conventional bogeyman story, but it has much more on its mind. With this frightening, seemingly simple story of a children’s book monster come to fearsome life, Kent burrows into the mindscape of two people—a mother and son—contending with delayed post-trauma.
Begging forgiveness, it’s the film equivalent of a pretty bouquet tossed in the general direction of Turing’s columbarium, carrying a card reading “Oops.”
A thought that occurred to me while watching Albert Serra’s Story of My Death: the lot of filmmakers traveling the prestige Euro festival circuit is not incomparable to that of the itinerant gentleman of prerevolutionary Europe.
This may be difficult to believe today, but there was for a moment a sense that Carrey was an actually dangerous, destabilizing force.
Bennett Miller’s bleakly efficient film is not only about America. It’s also about masculinity, brotherhood, fatherhood, class, competition, the drive for self-definition and expression. (It’s about just about everything except, of course, women, save one looming, destructive mother figure.)