Reviews
The ecstatic cinematic rhapsody that is Post Tenebras Lux is not for everybody—but noting this is not to suggest that it couldn’t be.
The film relies not on a formula of revelation by way of confrontation, but on its own trust in old-fashioned eternal truths. How does a film that makes such an ideal out of constancy drum up enough conflict and ambiguity to be compelling?
Love is what everybody needs in Susanne Bier’s profoundly (if accidentally) mean-spirited new film. And love is what they get—that is, if they happen to be either a good-hearted hairdresser undergoing cancer treatments or a widowed businessman with short tempers and untapped wells of sympathy.
Something in the Air is indeed a little anodyne, a bit blandly lovely both in its casting and in its seventies-inflected cinematography. It’s also fleet and fluid, which are welcome qualities and recognizable hallmarks of Assayas’s cinema over the years to boot.
The movie’s representative Iowans, then, are almost uniformly devoid of any meaningful agency, slaves to a system all too eager to reduce them to whimpering sellouts.
In lieu of stylistic fireworks or some sort of grand thesis statement, Piñeiro offers us nothing less than a window on extreme beauty, which radiates through the faces of his actresses and the Shakespeare plays that they intermittently recite in a variety of contexts.
To the Wonder is filled with the sorts of mysteries that not only make Malick’s work indefinably captivating but also instill awe and hope for the future of a medium supposedly in its death throes.
Carruth has claimed to be “weirded out by synopses,” and this is in keeping with his film, which feels terrified to parcel out information in any sort of way that might be given the dreaded label “conventional.”
Boyle has claimed, harking back to the voiceover at the beginning of Edinburgh-set Shallow Grave (“This could be any city—they’re all the same”), that he wanted his London to be mythic and anonymous, and to a large extent he succeeds.
Has Ryan Gosling become the least surprising actor in American movies? Notwithstanding his post-Mouseketeer breakthrough as a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer, the chiseled Ontarian has steadily blanched out his actorly palette; at this point he’s cornered the market on blankness.
Few accusations can make a film critic bristle as much as the claim that they are “reading too much into” something, whether it be a scene, shot, or gesture. Nobody wants to seem in thrall to an overactive imagination.
There’s no evidence that Korine is aiming for irony with Spring Breakers—contemporary, media-driven culture is so self-reflexive that it’s hard to tell the difference between earnestness and satire anymore. That ambiguity of meaning fuels Korine’s film.
In the U.S., Reality might be too easy a sell. Have you ever watched the teary, mascara-stained faces on The Bachelor and mused about the possibility that these allegedly lovelorn contestants were somehow less than genuine?
Sally Potter’s Ginger and Rosa opens with an extended shot of an atomic explosion. This rippling detonation signals the host of dislocations that will affect the lives of the film’s not-yet-introduced protagonists over the course of the few months in early sixties London we’ll share with them.