Reviews
Ricky is metaphorically sound (talk about empty nest syndrome), but occasionally it’s more than a little clunky: during Ricky’s awkward flights, the poor kid just hangs in his invisible harness and strings—there’s no motion or elegance to his movements.
The joy of watching A Town Called Panic lies in its uncanny evocation of adolescent invention. It’s an overturned toy box of a movie, complete with mismatched action figures, improvisatory effects, and stream-of-consciousness storytelling.
Most of the time, Hoffman depicts Tolstoy as a doddering, grandfatherly old genius; his accomplishments and inner turmoil are alluded to, discussed, and debated by others, but never given dramatic expression.
The almost mathematical control and precision of Firth’s lachrymal glands points to what proves to be most problematic about A Single Man.
It’s a thudding, impersonal work. Eastwood is infinitely better at the micro level, constructing narratives out of intimate situations, in which characters relate to one another in constricted settings.
Here is Meg Ryan, once more as an overgrown child-woman, cooing and pawing around as though a fresh ingenue; even ten years ago, at the time of You’ve Got Mail, this shtick seemed desperate.
Fans of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—and it’s surprising there are many, considering it’s such a sparse, bleakly unsettling work—will surely find much to like in John Hillcoat’s screen version.
The filmmaker’s Before Sunrise/Sunset diptych may be considered his archetypal works, but in focusing on just two characters they’re atypical: few American filmmakers are as fully invested in teasing out the character of communities, and his films are always full of well-balanced personages.
One of contemporary cinema’s most graceful, taken-for-granted actors, Robin Wright, too long in the shadow of her ex-husband, would seemingly have finally found the perfect leading role in Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.
There’s something satisfying about seeing such an odd, ugly duck on American multiplex screens this weekend. It will undoubtedly be the only film playing in which the protagonist is introduced calling a drowning man a “shitbird” and a “shit-turd.”
Updating the private investigator film with September 11 shadings is not a terribly novel idea, but writer/director Noah Buschel isn't an idea man.
All of this is really a polite way of saying that lately, Almodóvar has gotten a free pass from critics, who received his last two movies, Bad Education and Volver, with (too much) enthusiasm. They’re both sensuous, smartly conceived films, but they also trip over their own ambitions.