Reviews
Mathieu Amalric’s fourth feature loyally and effectively adapts George Simenon’s heart-dagger of a novel, retaining its scrambled chronology, as well as its carefully scattered evidence, red herrings, turnabouts, and subjective perspectives on a murder that makes the plot go round.
The film is something of a paean to the value and power of the editor—not just as a figure who helps writers communicate their ideas in clear sentences, but as one who shapes the overall voice, tone, and concerns of a publication over time.
His new film is certainly underwhelming in my living room, but it’s hard to imagine The Zero Theorem would be much to look at in a theater either, so uninspired are its futuristic images, the likes of which we’ve grown well accustomed to since the days of Blade Runner.
For all of the evident relish Broomfield has for the chase, the bum-rushing of sources, the turning over of rocks, the without-a-net-leaping into hostile environments, he does seem to be motored by real discontent, disbelief, and dismay over whatever bullshit he’s being fed.
Stray Dogs is a disturbing movie, not only because Tsai denies us any period of relaxing cruise control, but because he piles one long take after another atop the viewer, as to impress a sense of the weight of time.
It’s a story not of large, draconian measures that stifle human joy, but of the small, incremental decisions that lead to heartbreak, and which can make our everyday lives seem downright dystopic.
How is it that Ramon Zürcher’s beguiling, curious, deceptively slight first feature, The Strange Little Cat, seems to take place over the course of one family’s mundane afternoon, and at the same time in every possible moment in this family’s history?
Jealousy’s 77 whittled-down minutes play less like a single, continuous narrative than a series of isolated incidents, each enclosed by its own set of borders and calibrated to its own private sense of time.
To the list of hardy souls who have tried bringing Cormac McCarthy to the screen we may now add James Franco.
Both a companion piece to This Is Not a Film and a cinematic break from it, Closed Curtain at first seems to mark a return to “fiction” filmmaking for Panahi—to whatever extent categories like “fiction” and “nonfiction” even apply to his cinematic practice—and so it also invites a certain recalibration.
It’s a film that comes into being in deliberately awkward fashion; Boyhood’s incrementally finding out what it is, trying to create a philosophy and identity for itself—not unlike the process of growing up.
Most of the filmmaking decisions—like the use of two cameras during shooting, allowing the actors to behave organically and spontaneously without having to worry about hitting their marks or being fed lines of dialogue off-camera—are geared primarily toward showcasing the two distinct personalities at the movie’s core.
As the rare prequel to justify its existence, Rise of the Planet of the Apes demanded a follow-up, and the result is an evolutionary curiosity: a film that is at once markedly superior and considerably less satisfying than its predecessor.
There’s not a section of action or combat in The Avengers that seems considered enough to be worth remembering, but there are more than a handful of such sequences that linger after the credits roll in Bong’s new film, Snowpiercer.