Reviews
It’s a film that is a proclamation as much as it is a movie, a cause as much as an entertainment: this is cinema, it says, don’t let it die.
Sleeping Beauty is withholding to a fault, providing only the barest scraps of information about protagonist Lucy (Emily Browning), a perverse set-up since affording her a voice and the expressive capacities of consciousness would seem to be the film’s raison d'être.
Steve McQueen’s Shame is the latest entry in what we’ll call the sad sex subgenre. In a sad sex film, partners don’t enjoy each other’s flesh, they rut. They bump uglies. They shudder. Their faces evince no enjoyment as their bodies try to make contact. Sometimes they cry during orgasm.
As if A Brighter Summer Day’s four-hour length weren’t intimidating enough to the uninitiated viewer, Yang makes sure to weigh his film down from the get-go, both formally and thematically.
The recreation of the structure, pacing, and visual delights and imperfections of silent films is nigh on flawless: certain movements of characters appear artificially quicker; the intertitles frequently don’t match the words being said on screen, and are drafted as they would have been then.
J. Edgar's screenplay, by Milk’s Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black, is wildly ambitious, combining elements of biography, forbidden romance, Freudian agony, wobbly camp, and Oliver Stoned cameos from Robert F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Charles Lindbergh.
Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn, the latest film to tackle the subject, sticks mostly to biopic terrain, though initially, at least, it addresses the disjunction between Monroe’s public face and her stormy private life.
For a Cronenberg film, there’s very little violence, save a few vigorous spankings, but it would be a mistake to call A Dangerous Method bloodless.
Though Herzog has lately seemed to delight in upending viewer expectations (how else to explain his 2009 Nicolas Cage–starring reboot of Bad Lieutenant?), his superb new documentary, Into the Abyss—its title very much of a piece with his recent ones’—still comes as something of a surprise
Thus we get chestnuts such as “A family seems like an archipelago” and “What is it that makes the women in my life want to destroy themselves?” These lines undermine rather than deepen a character who’s richest when Payne and Clooney feel most ambivalent about him.
Melancholia is a dispiriting return to form for a filmmaker who suffers when he knows exactly what he wants to say and delights in pissing the world off.
A reimagining of a remake, then—or maybe, to get into the spirit of a story about an alien intelligence hopping between hosts, it’s a kind of inhabitation—an attempt to mimic the textures of its source material so that fans and newcomers alike can’t even tell the difference.
Like Claire Denis’s recent White Material, Ulrich Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness, which earned a Silver Bear for directing at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, is something of a postcolonial Heart of Darkness, a complex and at times allegorical portrait of Europeans living in Africa.
What’s daring about Martha Marcy May Marlene is that we’re denied any view of its main character before her transformative experience.