Reviews
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.)
The first thing that you should know before watching Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman is that it operates under the fundamental assumption that everyone who took part in the settling of the American West was, by almost any contemporary standard, insane.
Christopher Nolan usually makes movies about characters who are prisoners of their own devices, which makes Interstellar a departure. This time out, a protagonist’s single-minded obsession leads him to liberation rather than entrapment.
It is, I think, this impulse to account for the form of finished objects—to think through the circumstances under which they were made, the material limitations of their production, and the needs they were created to fill—that leads Wiseman to take the interest he does in the day-to-day business of institutional administration.
The intellectual questions in nonfiction of late have swirled around hybridity and exploding forms, but hopefully in the wake of CITIZENFOUR we’ll be refocused on the basics of filmmaking: Poitras has crafted a real-life thriller more energetic than Kathryn Bigelow’s infinitely higher budgeted Zero Dark Thirty.
By its nature, 3D only functions if the apparatus used to record its images and the human eyes there to receive those images all work in tandem. What happens, Goodbye to Language wonders, when even that breaks down, yet the pretense of 3D remains?
There’s nothing subtle about using a literal avalanche as a catalyst for the disruption of a seemingly perfect nuclear family, but it’s a lack of subtlety that’s surely not lost on director Ruben Östlund.
Thinking of The Heart Machine as a film about the split between the physical and the emotional, and the romantic difficulties that emerge from that, is more helpful than typifying it as another “relationship drama for the digital-age.”
Iñárritu orchestrates a story of pervasive cultural desperation, which, though it takes the ever more commercializing Broadway milieu as its subject, is clearly meant to speak to the state of contemporary cinema and the culture around it.
In Whiplash, Damien Chazelle (Guy and Madeleine on a Park Bench) has so effectively represented the intense physicality of being a musician that watching it one might wonder if a drummer could actually play himself to death.
Considering that Perry identifies as a hardcore cinephile, his style is surprisingly performance-driven: his work prioritizes dialogue and the close-up. This isn’t to say his movies, with their staunch commitment to celluloid, aren’t beautiful to look at, but that his voice comes through via the accumulation of emotion rather than flourish.
It’s certainly a delicate movie, filled with pockets of open space and set to an unhurried, loping rhythm. Yet there’s something deeply ambiguous about Life of Riley’s simplicity. It’s the radical sort of simplicity reminiscent of the late output of so many great artists . . .
Men, Women & Children begins in deep space, with images of the Voyager space probe twirling serenely underneath a crisp, omniscient, scene-setting voiceover by Emma Thompson. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey mashed up with Barry Lyndon.
Even its unabashed absurdity cannot help mask the core rot of this project, the kind of nasty business that flatters its audience for being complicit in it.