When Michael Moore released his anti-Trump screed Fahrenheit 11/9, in 2018, I was still in a mood of electoral shellshock. I was very much seeking an answer to the question the director posed in voice-over at the beginning of the film: “How the f--- did this happen?” It’s amazing how time has made armchair pundits out of all of us. Hindsight being what it is, Trump’s … [Read more...]
‘Burning Ghost’: Go toward the (Hollywood) light
Eschatology is at the heart of French director Stéphane Batut’s Burning Ghost, but to this viewer’s mind, so is capitalism, a concept as eternal as the soul. That’s because even his premature death can’t keep young Juste (Thimotée Robart) out of the labor force. Juste opens the movie in an earthbound purgatory. Newly freed from his dying body but not yet adjusted to the … [Read more...]
‘The Rental’: Sharing the time with horror
If you’ve seen The Rental and were at all affected by it, you may never vacation the same way again. Specifically, if you check into a rental property — an idyllic, too-good-to-be-true, cliff-hugging property on the Pacific Coast, perhaps — the first thing you will do is inspect the showerheads. You will be looking for hidden cameras. Voyeurism is a central theme of Dave … [Read more...]
“The 11th Green”: ETs-and-Eisenhower flick loses sight of the drama
On the night of Feb. 20, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower interrupted a vacation in Palm Springs, Calif. Some say he made an unexpected visit to Edwards Air Force Base. There, in the secret meeting to end all secret meetings, he rendezvoused with a pair of angelic, white-haired, blue-eyed extraterrestrials, who cautioned the president — to no avail — to eliminate his … [Read more...]
Ambitious ‘Radioactive’ captures Curie’s psychology, shortchanges her work
The discovery that would change humanity forever arrives relatively early in Radioactive, the long-awaited biopic of Marie Curie. We’re not 30 minutes in, and she’s already captured the phenomenon of radioactivity, in all its Ectoplasmic-green glow, in a tiny vial. It happens after a perfunctory montage of beakers and equations, of Marie (Rosamund Pike) and her husband and … [Read more...]
Starry ‘The Truth’ too insular to make deep impact
To note that The Truth is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s starriest movie to date is to understate. While the Japanese director’s previous 13 films have been cast with actors unfamiliar to the non-cinephile masses, and often earn little more than festival and art-house exhibition, his latest has all the ingredients for broader appeal and a wide theatrical opening — something it was poised … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A Dardenne brothers masterpiece and more
When I started writing the View From Home column for this website in 2010, it was single-focused on physical media — the Blu-rays and DVDs that had yet to be usurped by the streaming juggernauts. Times have changed, and while I too have integrated streaming for the majority of home viewing, exciting physical media still drops every week, and for certain titles it remains … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Tommaso’ finds Ferrara, Dafoe through the looking glass
As a work of semi-improvised metafiction set in Rome, Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso (now playing in Virtual Cinemas) is a fragrant cipollini onion inviting us to peel away its layers. Is Willem Dafoe’s titular protagonist, a volatile expat filmmaker with a marriage on the rocks, wrestled from Ferrara’s own troubled biography? Is Dafoe playing a raw version of himself? When he tells … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Three free food docs on YouTube
As I discovered recently, YouTube is not only an infinitely populated platform for pay-per-view movies both classic and brand-new. It’s also a generous purveyor of free movies easily stream-able on your smart TV through the basic YouTube app. The bulk of these titles are fairly obscure — what used to be dubbed “straight to video” — but spelunkers of the entire “free movies” … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘The Vast of Night’ is a perfectly timed sound bath of adventure
The impact of the film industry on the coronavirus pandemic has been depressingly documented, from the indefinite postponement of movie shoots to the delayed release of studio pictures to the continued closures — some will be permanent — of cinemas. Audio-based art forms, on the other hand, are thriving. Offering the illusion of intimacy but the safety of distance, radio and … [Read more...]