Reviews
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.
The title may have been inspired by Shakespeare, but the content of Letters to Juliet is derived from a sticky romantic comedy subgenre: the Italian vacation movie.
There's a genuinely touching movie here—Evets’s excellent performance and his character's nervous breakdown and possible redemption through forgiveness and rekindled affections—but the layers of padding that contain it end up overcushioning its impact.
Though the title of Laura Poitras’s exceptionally well-made new documentary, The Oath, is in the singular, there are a number of solemn vows therein.
The thesis of the new documentary from Oscar winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) should be clear from its title. Casino Jack and the United States of Money bills itself as a “story of what our democracy has become,” a sobering examination of the corrosive influence of money on American politics.
If ever there were a movie that cried out to be either accepted on its own terms or fucking hated, that film is Trash Humpers.