Reviews
Where la Rochelle held what amounted to an unforgivably romantic view of suicide, which the young idealistic Malle embraced, Trier (only a distant relation of Lars) has opted to strip away their stylistic floss to forge, in a soberly formal style, a raw and relevant portrait of Scandinavian suffering.
Shot on grainy, jittery, slate-gray 16mm, Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel is a rare issuance from the lost generation of young American filmmakers in the fin du cinéma age that looks and feels “like a real movie.”
Midway through Hirokazu Kore-eda’s I Wish, a grandfather grumpily wonders, “Do kids today feel anything about anything?” Judging by this enchanting and wise film, indeed they do.
Superhero narratives historically depend upon the tension between the human and the superhuman—we can relate and we can’t, they’re one of us and they’re not—but this film quite literally takes place in the clouds.
True to this association, the movie treats Sebald with great solemnity, as a sort of Stonehenge-like ruin in and of himself, posthumously trying to make him something like a novelty subsection of the great themes of his own antiquarian German poetry and prose—Civilization, History, Memory.
The Pirates! Band of Misfits is a terrific concept (the dry Monty Python–esque wit and handmade charms of stop-motion animation masters Aardman applied to a swashbuckling high seas adventure) casting desperately about for a movie
This is not a film fueled by garrulous and good-natured young people questioning themselves and the world around them, but rather populated by those who’ve been around the block long enough to stop asking.
As time passes, via a steady rhythm of daily business (phone calls, appointments, parties, moping around), grief slowly begins to give way, as it never seemed it would, to a tentative levity.
Post Mortem is only Larraín’s second feature, but he has already proven a distinct style—an unmistakable deadpan—and an interest in political and personal utopias.
Much of Cabin’s delight stems from the many intricate reveals that comprise the narrative’s structure, but the film is far from gimmicky or contrived, relying on the audience’s fluency in the language of horror films to simultaneously revel in and interrogate the established pleasures of the genre.
We Have a Pope has nothing to do with the Pope, much as director Nanni Moretti’s 2006 film Il Caimano, widely regarded as a j’accuse against Italy's controversial Prime Minister, was not really about Berlusconi
What’s most wondrous about his latest film is Davies’s subtle recalibration of his source material, Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea, into a profoundly felt, even liberated, tale of feminine longing.