Because the music sounds good, A Complete Unknown finds a way to win our hearts. It doesn’t attempt to say anything new about Dylan, to foreground some dramatic arc in his biography we haven’t been exposed to already. It’s more interested in transporting the audience to a time and place that yielded the creative flourishing of one of the greatest American artists.
Mangold knows the music in his film is good, which is why so much of its runtime is…
Jude Law—still a very good actor.
I have some notes, like the classic complaint in cop movies re: backup, letting the bad guy get away, and a few other nitpicks…but the performances, entertainment value, breathtaking vistas, pacing, and filmmaking style in general are enough to overwhelm those flaws. This had me locked in.
Kind of like Heat, but in Idaho.
What’s worse: your father commits suicide because his family life is too miserable to bear, or your mother kills your father because they can’t stand each other anymore? This question isn’t immediately posed to the audience in Anatomy of a Fall, but it becomes the central dilemma our emotional surrogate—a blind teenager played by Milo Machado Graner—faces at the film’s climax.
The scaffolding that props up this conflict makes this courtroom drama a great one. The difficulty of balancing marriage…
The best movie I saw last year was Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, a debut brimming with the kind of emotional charge that results from a deeply personal story. Past Lives shares that film’s thoughtfulness, so it may come as no surprise that it’s also a semi-autobiographical directorial debut. Celine Song, who emigrated from Korea as a kid, grew up in Canada, and eventually settled in New York, followed a similar path to the film’s protagonist, Nora (Greta Lee). Aftersun centered its…
Patrick D liked Wilhelm Scream’s review of A Complete Unknown
Patrick D reviewed and rated A Complete Unknown on Wednesday Jan 8, 2025
Patrick D added Maurice to his watchlist
