Reviews
Orphan was ugly but it also paid off all of its set-ups with gusto. Unknown seems to have been made under stricter supervision, and so isn’t comparably batshit; though, a few of the moments you cite are the ones where the director's sense of humor breaks through—quite literally in the apartment dust-up.
The first time a character utters the word “Baltimore” in Matthew Porterfield’s Putty Hill, it is as an explanation, or rather an excuse, for why a 24-year-old named Cory died of a heroin overdose.
Mechanically, Unknown, the new picture from Jaume Collet-Serra, isn’t all that different than midforties Hollywood cloak-and-dagger thrillers or later Cold War espionage actioners.
The movement that doesn’t want to be known as “mumblecore” has been maligned for its focus on privileged, white twentysomethings (though to this charge, I’d argue that most American films focus on privileged, white something-or-others).
Perhaps this emotionally piecemeal approach is meant to emphasize Mexico City as a place divided up, factionalized, of discrete interests constantly at odds with each other.
Poetry, a remarkable study of age, class, loneliness, responsibility, art, and the illusory nature of being, is not a film about the disease, nor, mercifully, is it a film that uses the disease as a device or even metaphor.
In Cedar Rapids, Miguel Arteta proves that he’s capable of finding humanity and subtext where other filmmakers see caricature and cliché.
Even more than Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Haynes, and other former enfants terribles of the queer filmmaking world, Gregg Araki seems caught in the double bind of maintaining outré street cred while simultaneously showcasing a more “mature” vision.
Before Im Sang-soo’s version premiered at Cannes last year, The Housemaid had already been remade four times by Kim himself, each version further twisting an already deformed tale of a ferocious femme fatale who enters a middle-class home and tears apart its nuclear family.
It sounds like proudly madcap indie quirk, but it isn’t quite that. It is something that’s occasionally altogether bracing, and Barney’s Version is at its best when, as in the above described wedding scene, its main character’s incorrigibility seems to have permeated his entire surroundings.
Structured in four parts, the self-identifying-Palestinian actor-director’s latest film, like his previous ones, straddles the line between sobriety and whimsy in its evocation of the absurdity of the contemporary Israel-Palestine reality—perhaps not without effort, but also not without a great degree of artistic success.
In Mike Leigh’s Another Year, four seasons come and go, characters arrive and depart, produce ripens and rots, everything and nothing changes. There's such weariness in that title. Living is shadowed by dying, bounty is turned over by hunger, loneliness is assuaged by company.