Reviews
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.
The fact that such a heavily allegorical, narratively tricky film would incite anger is a testament to the inherent power of Loznitsa’s imagery; the cumulative impact of My Joy’s many jarring episodes announces him as a potentially major filmmaker.
In Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols’s follow-up to his excellent 2007 drama Shotgun Stories, all the protagonist’s anxieties condense in the form of a storm cloud.
As far as big studio dramas are concerned, Moneyball functions well—it’s far too long but goes down easy, is well acted and stylishly shot. But it’s also a missed opportunity.
If Weekend felt at all like a treatise on the State of Being Gay Now the easygoing charm that makes it so special would have been obscured.
There’s a voiceover buzzing through Alexei Fedorchenko’s brief, impressionistic, and sentimental Silent Souls, and it’s eager to tell you how to absorb what you’re watching.
That patina of you-are-there atmospherics does little to sell the film’s stabs at state-of-the-union relevance.
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu—a thrilling three-hour whirlwind through tumultuous late twentieth-century Romanian history that focuses exclusively on the deposed president and tyrant—reminds us that the public face is often all we are privileged to see.