Reviews
This exceedingly strange bundle of nested narratives dared to introduce scores of characters and storylines (some rich tributaries, others dead ends), perspectives and locales (Mozambique-for-India, the Salado River) with an almost ceaseless stream of omniscient voiceovers.
Federico Veiroj’s pint-sized second feature, A Useful Life, runs only slightly over an hour, but the gauntlet it tosses at the feet of the cinephiles who are its most likely audience suggests a young filmmaker eager to grapple with the state of film culture.
Opening images of cloud-strewn skies, waves lapping the shoreline, and parched expanses of land coupled with an incantatory, poetic voiceover (written by Benacerraf and Pierre Seghers) set an epic tone from the start.
His form of documentary purism relies on immersion and meticulously edited observation rather than subtitles, narration, interviews, establishing shots, or any of the other tools that most nonfiction filmmakers depend on to construct their stories and propel them forward.
It doesn’t just dabble in a subject matter the filmmaker has hitherto eschewed, but goes whole hog, channeling spirits from the netherworld and envisioning the bright lights of the Great Beyond with all the loud music cues and fuzzy CG of an episode of Medium.
When first announced, Olivier Assayas’s epic nearly six-hour, three-part miniseries/cinema event seemed like it might be almost more than fans of the man’s work could stand.
Nowhere Boy concerns the late adolescent years of John Lennon, his coming to rock and roll, and the formation of his first band, the Quarrymen, but it’s not so much a music film as a behind-the-music film, fashioning a handsome soap opera out of the iconic singer-songwriter’s biographical back catalog
A clunky, rattling toy chest of tired horror tropes, The Hole will nevertheless win over the Gremlins and Matinee mastermind’s devoted fans (I’m looking at you, Jonathan Rosenbaum!), and maybe a few brave tots in the bargain.
As expected, the two best segments are from the filmmakers whose careers are most worth following: Fernando Eimbcke and Carlos Reygadas.
The film's more resonant characters are to be found amongst the supporting cast of villagers. For example, what begins as a neat neo-Shakespearian conceit—two bored local teenaged girls observe all the shenanigans between bouts of texting and reading celebrity gossip rags—soon becomes neo-Homeric.
Feelings of inadequacy prompt outsized ambition; The Social Network imagines a young man’s violent remapping of virtual terrain as an attempt to impress a girl.
If Howl’s bids for cultural relevancy fall short, its attempts to visually “poeticize” Ginsberg’s words via phantasmagoric animated sequences carry a similarly unfortunate whiff of undercooked ambition.
It’s clear right from the opening credits—the film’s most purely invigorating sequence— that Enter the Void will pummel rather than make one ponder.
“It's Heat meets The Departed!” shout the TV ads, forgivable marketing puffery that the entertaining but chronically hackneyed The Town can't possibly begin to live up to.