Reviews
It feels likely at this point that we’ll look back on the last major release of the aughts as a watershed moment and feel that big budget entertainments were different post-Avatar. But how?
Memories are remnants of subjective experience, further skewed by time and the brain’s chemical disruptions. But a different sort of subjectivity is afoot when one’s memories are appropriated, conjectured over, and made material by someone else.
This is a work about an ambiguity—its disturbing central event is an act fueled by mysterious motivation, and it’s enacted by a character whom we only think we have come to know and understand.
By the time Sarandon is burning eggs on the stove and sweeping dirt under the rug (ah, visual metaphors), all we can do is watch the onscreen pileup with mute, rubbernecking horror—which, to be fair, puts us in a position similar to that of the film’s not-quite-departed protagonist.
Her two films are as unsentimental as they are sensitive, and so attuned to the messy modalities of behavior that even tallies of fear and heartbreak accumulate with dignity.
Goldin's plotting is clumsy, his flights of fancy uninspiring and uninspired. Despite this, he gets some nice performances out of his actors and keeps the movie clipping along efficiently.
The one-sided would-be romance complicated by class distinctions is nothing extraordinary in Williams work, and The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond proves a particularly tiresome retread.
First-time director Na Hong-jin’s solid command of thriller/policier basics results in a comforting ride—thrills, humor and scares are well-parceled, characters develop, cheesy Eighties synth washes abound, the police are all morons, and he’s even managed to breathe some life back into the stolid foot chase (twice!).
If to be human is to err, then the Sherlock Holmes of Guy Ritchie’s bumbling, limply cartoonish updating of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic literary ingénue, played by Robert Downey Jr., is not human. An audience seeks to identify with a protagonist by sharing in his or her mistakes. What’s missing in Sherlock Holmes, and in Holmes himself, is the element of human struggle.
Despite his genre play, Haneke doesn’t care about isolated crimes or mysteries. Personal guilt is (here literally) child’s play. The big culprit, as usual, is the monster called society.
Those of us who grew up wearing our allegiance to his earlier work proudly won’t be pleased to note that Gilliam-esque now seems little more than a fraying bag of tired tricks.
Less is more in the sophomore feature by Cannes Camera d’or winner Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest), a filmmaker attentive, like his fellow under-40 countrymen Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu, to the ironies of bureaucracy in post-totalitarian Romania.
Up in the Air wants to tell us a lot about America. About our priorities, our lost dreams, our pasts and futures, our blind spots, and, as any award-hungry movie does, it wants to diagnose how We live now.
We know from the serenade at the beginning of Starman that Bridges can sing and pick a guitar. But more than that, Bridges’s bluesy delivery (more Leonard Cohen and Tom Petty than Waylon Jennings) is truer to the contemporary sound of the progressive country singers who survived the seventies.