Reviews
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.
As he proved in Bad Education, Volver, and especially Broken Embraces, Almodóvar has grown increasingly lousy with exposition. Once the back story starts coming fast and furious here, the film is helplessly revealed as a precarious structure—which it needn’t have been.
Drive is a useful example of the ways in which opportunistic filmmakers can fuse art-house gestures with baldly commercial material, particularly the idea that playing clichés straight equals a Bressonian revelation of their “essence.”
Although born to a large extent out of film criticism and debate, the Dreileben films never feel engineered or studied, partly because of their explicit goal of expanding the possibilities in film form across art-house and mainstream genres.
The title of 50/50, a comedy about a young man diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, refers to main character Adam’s chances of living.
The frozen time of this “unrealistic film,” as Kaurismäki calls it, is punctuated by more than a few glimpses of the contemporary world.