Architecture as a conduit for artistry…but also pain.
There are two pieces of dialogue that best sum up what The Brutalist is about. The first is Brody’s speech about the cube, a scene that knows it is thematically significant, that reaches for importance, and manages to get there all the same.
The second line is from László’s wife, who says “this place is rotten.” It’s an indictment of the American Dream myth, and it’s one of the many moments in…
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…
A showcase of technical bravura, no doubt. The lighting is precise, each frame seemingly manicured with a very specific cast of darkness. The creation of Nosferatu himself might be my favorite thing about this film—Skarsgård is completely and utterly unrecognizable, and his voice is both terrifying and kind of funny.
Eggers’s technical update on the Dracula story is not enough to elevate Nosferatu into the discussion of the year’s best films, since the material is so well-trodden and the script…
Glazer pits the mundanity of family life against the horror of Auschwitz. Example: the wife of a high-ranking SS official takes her mother on a tour of their home’s garden, which sits right across the wall from the smokestacks and screams of the most infamous death camp of the Holocaust. A dolly glides the camera through the expertly manicured lawn, following the two characters as the high barbed-wire wall looms behind them. Later on, the ashes of Auschwitz dead are…
At the intersection of competitive sports and sexual desire you’re likely to find a gleaming, toned athlete with some maturity issues. To put it another way: if winning a game is the activity when you feel the most alive, you’re apt to transpose winning into the various arenas of your life. Psychologically, it’s a recipe for disaster. Cinematically, it’s a lot of fun to watch.
Challengers is extremely entertaining. The tennis scenes get pumped with meaning as the story…
A spectacle. So much so that I forgive its storytelling flaws, most of which crop up in the second half of the film. The Star Wars comps are obviously there, but the fantasy franchise of my youth was Lord of the Rings, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the scale of this movie and how it reflects the way The Two Towers was a bigger and bolder movie than Fellowship. So, the stakes are high for the third installment.
Each…
Yórgos Lánthimos’s films are dreams, each governed by its own version of non-logic, painted with its own distinct brushstrokes. Poor Things is the best dream he’s had, the most narratively engaging and the most visually impressive. Emma Stone is excellent. Her character’s transformation is a daunting task for an actor, and she nails it. Mark Ruffalo is hilarious—the funniest performance he’s ever had. The production design is somewhere between Tim Burton and James and the Giant Peach, with that surreal…
Marisa Tomei as charisma personified. Watch her dance across the screen and be entranced.
At times, this feels like the indiest of indies. A result of the interior lighting shots, the distinct shadows running across the frame, the camera moves, and the grainy film look. Jarmusch, Cronenberg, 1970s cinema—these all feel like influences on the filmmaking and the performances. The meta-textual quality of the storytelling is much more of the zeitgeist, and it’s what makes A Different Man so clever. Combined with the aforementioned style, it’s also what makes this film uniquely its own.
50 Cent manages to botch every possible acting moment, even when he’s asked to just look at something and nod. Love it!
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 already been exposed to. 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…