Reviews
It Felt Like Love could have been another lock-up-your-daughters cautionary tale à la Thirteen, but is instead remarkably nonjudgmental.
Nymphomaniac is something of a sarcastic thumbs-up for Lars the iconoclast: its scenario of a woman narrating her own erotic awakening—which then turns into a kind of all-night bender, spanning decades and the best body-and-soul baring efforts of two actresses—is easily seen as a sort of run-on director’s commentary track.
Based on the director’s upbringing amidst the tumultuous late-1970s occupation of Phnom Penh by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge communist militia, the film is an intimately detailed account of one family’s struggle to survive the brutality of a movement whose reach extended well into every facet of Cambodian society.
Enemy—an adaptation of The Double, a 2002 novel by the late Portuguese Nobel winner José Saramago—centers around the time-honored doppelgänger conceit, and the film itself looks as if it was torn straight from the pages of a slim paperback, with each frame yellowed to the hue of a foxed volume.
Anderson adores overtures overburdened with backstory, and The Grand Budapest Hotel has a particularly ornate framing device: the movie proper is nestled within an elaborately impractical nesting doll–type structure. This is only suiting for a film besotted with the lovely and the useless.
If The Wind Rises resembles Hollywood biopics like William Wellman’s Gallant Journey or John Ford’s The Long Gray Line in its decade-spanning structure and bittersweet tone, it is a singular showcase for the animation Miyazaki developed and perfected at Studio Ghibli.
Child’s Pose opens mid-conversation as a mother discusses her son’s personal life with another middle-aged woman sitting next to her in an anonymous room. The setting seems muted, the surroundings drab and not very homey—all in all not an unfamiliar setup for a contemporary Romanian film.
It’s not beside the point to talk about Omar’s movie-star looks (or his fashionable and great-fitting jeans), because it’s the first indication of the smoothness and conventional aesthetics of this well-structured, compelling thriller.
Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P is a curious case: a scrupulously faithful adaptation that toes a narrow, wobbly line between honoring and subverting traditional therapy’s reliance on the spoken word.
It’s a fine irony that a movie so determined to satirically skewer groupthink has generated so much of it.
At once sinuous and almost mournfully droll, Vic + Flo Saw a Bear itself feels a bit like an obstacle course, setting up a number of genre elements (ex-con romance, end-of-the-line resignation, cat-and-mouse games, etc.) only to bob and weave around them.
Claude Lanzmann, the most intractable and demanding of modern filmmakers, has spent his career hammering out two iron-clad, seemingly unresolvable principles: a) memory, in any really meaningful sense of the word, is close to impossible, and b) memory is completely, indisputably necessary.
There is no narrative arc to the 3D-shot Charlie Victor Romeo; there are just different planes, different reasons for the crashes, all left opaque to the viewer until the arrival of a series of clinical slides announcing casualties and causes after abrupt cuts to black signifying the plane has gone down.
Certain elements of Visitors suggest that Reggio has grown closer in spirit since Koyaanisqatsi to the wide-eyed young stoners who helped catalyze that film’s success.