Reviews
His choice to tackle this fictionalized story of Nevada’s notorious Mustang Ranch, the state's first legalized brothel, marked a chance for him to reconnect with Devil's Advocate sleaze, but Love Ranch’s tameness and sentimentality hints that the 65-year-old, whose most recent movie was 2004's Ray, is softening.
Like this year’s other great paean to the cinema, Inglorious Basterds, Wild Grass is all about movie living and loving, but like Tarantino’s film, the idiosyncrasies of the filmmaking never outpace the idiosyncrasies of its characters.
While Hollywood has always been invested in catching war from the front lines, the cinematic output born of this particular moment has far exceeded that of any previous combat situation.
Occupying a strange zone between nostalgic homecoming and generalized snapshot of Middle America, Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross’s pleasantly lackadaisical documentary 45365 observes daily life in the brothers’ native Sidney, Ohio.
Abandoning the freewheeling ingenuity of his previous period adaptations (Jude, The Claim, Tristram Shandy), as well as the frenetic pacing of docu-realistic dramas like In This World or A Mighty Heart, Winterbottom’s latest effort, though enthralling on the whole, sometimes feels too literal for its own good.
Navigating the rocky straits of the serious-minded comedy, Let It Rain maintains a breezy tone while hinting at deeper concerns.
Cyrus bears an unmistakably stunted relationship to his mother. He calls her by her first name, spends an inordinate amount of time with her to the exclusion of any other friends, and engages in creepy behavior, including using the bathroom while she showers.
Director Luca Guadagnino and star Tilda Swinton have been unabashed about their lofty aspirations. In interviews, they invoke a lost tradition of swoony, sweeping melodrama. Their nostalgia permeates every frame of I Am Love, but that hardly makes the movie musty.
Here, as in The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, reality and fantasy seem to commingle, and the fantastic offers respite from the uninviting and unforgiving social environment in which the movie is set.
So much allegorical baggage has been heaped upon George A. Romero’s army of walking corpses over the last four decades, it’s little wonder their decaying legs haven’t collapsed under the weight.
This homecoming, of sorts, is welcome. Jeunet has always proudly embraced making movies with massively wide appeal, but since signature debut Delicatessen and the lesser but fitfully captivating The City of Lost Children, each attempt to reach an ever-larger audience has forced him to undermine his already narrow talents.
Hansen-Løve, as it turns out, is not interested in charting the everyday frustrations of a man unable to mix his worlds; rather The Father of My Children becomes a portrait of crippling contemporary anxiety, both professional and familial, and the possibility that they may never be fully reconciled.
On the one hand, the gag kids the conventions of MacGruber’s namesake and most explicit inspiration, MacGyver, whose hero was able to turn virtually any object or situation to his crime-fighting advantage (“Don’t thank me: thank the moon’s gravitational pull”). On the other, it’s simply an excuse for the star to make a literal ass of himself onscreen.
The old dictum “you’re only as good as your last picture” appears to apply far less universally than one might think.