Set primarily in 1950s Rio de Janeiro, The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão is a film of dew and perspiration, of longing and pheromones. The heat, torrid and constant, causes everything to sweat, from people to the glasses they drink from. The movie practically glistens with their labor of everyday survival. When Guida Gusmão (Julia Stockler), young and rebellious sister … [Read more...]
HR is out to lunch in formulaic ‘Like a Boss’
Hollywood’s latest ladies-talking-dirty comedy is proof that simply acing the Bechdel Test is no longer enough — and that to make another winning Paul Feig or Judd Apatow film, you kinda need a Paul Feig or Judd Apatow at the helm. But first, the positives. The two women at the center of Miguel Arteta’s Like a Boss, lifelong besties Mia Carter (Tiffany Haddish) and Mel Paige … [Read more...]
‘1917’: All soulless on the Western Front
How’s this for a criticism: There’s something unbearably perfect about Sam Mendes’ World War I picture 1917. On the one hand, the film — specially formatted for IMAX’s expansive 1:90:1 aspect ratio — takes great pains to reestablish moviegoing as a necessary cinematic experience, an increasingly quaint notion in the day-and-date streaming era. But it reaches for this … [Read more...]
‘Little Women’: A masterful, ravishing vision of young adulthood
I’m either the best or the worst person to review the latest adaptation of Little Women. I’ve not seen any of the previous seven adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s coming-of-age family saga — not even the George Cukor; heresy, I know — nor have I read the book. Which is to say that you won’t find any gripes regarding the latest iteration’s fealty to the source, or, … [Read more...]
‘Ray & Liz’: A bleak slog through the bogs of English misery
The setting of Richard Billingham’s debut feature Ray & Liz is a council flat in England’s Black Country, a series of boroughs so named because of the coal mines and other heavy-industry dross that congested its air and sickened its population of people too poor to live anywhere else. It’s a moldering, putrid place, and you can almost smell it through the screen. The … [Read more...]
Masterful ‘Marriage Story’ gets power from little heartbreaks
The last time Scarlett Johansson traversed a void of frame-filling darkness, she was a voluptuous alien consuming eager men like so much protein in 2013’s Under the Skin. In the opening fade-in of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, she is once again a figure framed in absolute blackness, a light emerging from its absence in glorious medium shot. It’s almost religious, like one … [Read more...]
‘Honey Boy’: A bracing look at an actor’s haunted childhood
“The only thing my father gave me that was of any value was pain. And now you want to take that away from me.” This line, spoken by the troubled young actor Otis Lort (Lucas Hedges) in a therapy session in a rehab center, captures the ache at the core of Honey Boy. The project is directed, with great sensitivity and poise, by Israeli filmmaker Alma Har’el, but is the … [Read more...]
‘Scandalous’: Fake news, real scoops and stumping for Trump
Unlike the National Enquirer itself, you just can’t make this stuff up. There is actual videotape of Generoso Pope Jr., the media mogul who bought a New York sports/racing broadsheet called the Enquirer and transformed it into the most-read supermarket tabloid in history, arguing with a straight face that his publication is an antidote to the negativity of the mainstream … [Read more...]
The power and the infamy: ‘Grace of God’ takes tough look at priest scandal
Sweeping yet intimate, and told with a classicist rigor, By the Grace of God isn’t just the most mature and elegant film from the international enfant terrible François Ozon. It’s also among the year’s most consequential and newsworthy movies, in which the recent events it dramatizes nip at the heels of history — and precedents — in the making. In France in 2016, the … [Read more...]
Non-stop weirdness of ‘Greener Grass’ hides tragic core
Speaking about his 1938 classic Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks later said that the film “had a great fault, and I learned an awful lot from that. There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball, and since that time I learned my lesson and don’t intend ever again to make everybody crazy.” Well, even the old masters can be wrong. Yes, Baby was relentlessly … [Read more...]