Reviews
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.
Writer-director Cristian Mungiu presents us with both sides of a dilemma, and then with mounting evidence that it will be irresolvable. He has, in effect, made an austere realist suspense film, not unlike his celebrated previous feature, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
Leviathan is almost entirely disinterested in the naturalistic or anthropological, neither a landscape (or even seascape) documentary, nor an insight into labor and social relations. Instead, Leviathan offers an image of the world as almost something alien.
Kiarostami’s films are imbued with a rare emotional lucidity, and yet they still steadfastly undermine the traditional dynamic of film acting, so that any outward show of emotion is first a representation of that emotion before it can be received as an expression of it.
The key to Larraín’s effectiveness thus far has been his ability to strategically, and from different angles, analyze issues surrounding the political stain the dictator left on Chile.
Night Across the Street is stitched together from a handful of tales by the Chilean author Hernán del Solar. As if to indicate just how much time he spent in made-up worlds, or maybe just for the sake of pulling off yet another act of sleight-of-hand, Ruiz gives us his autobiography in the form of an adaptation.