Reviews
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.)
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.