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...]
Bleak ‘Lighthouse’ puts masculinity, audience to test
Fade in on an evening commute. We’re on the ocean, vast and pitiless. Framed against the ominous soundtrack of a foghorn’s elephantine bellow, a dinghy comes into focus, making its incremental progress with two stoic men behind the wheel. Their destination: oblivion. More literally, these rugged individuals — Robert Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow and Willem Dafoe’s Thomas Wake … [Read more...]
‘Pain and Glory’: Almodóvar’s marvelous memory film
“In the cinema of my childhood, it always smells of piss … and of jasmine, and of summer breezes.” It’s a line so good it appears twice — or is it three times? — in Pedro Almodóvar’s tender new memory film, Pain and Glory. Tactile in its descriptiveness, and elegant in its poetic juxtaposition — in the lovely ellipsis separating the pungent and the perfumed — it struck me … [Read more...]
Director keeps ‘Lucy in the Sky’ grounded in freak-show territory
Eleven years after seeing The Hurt Locker for the first and only time, the scene that’s most ingrained in my memory has nothing to do with IEDs in a godforsaken desert. It’s Jeremy Renner back home, lost in the supermarket, stymied by a wall of cereal. Describing a kind of domestic impotence, it remains the quintessential poetic image of war’s addictive pull. The battlefield … [Read more...]
‘The Sound of Silence’: Does tuner have the fix for what ails us?
Peter Lucian, the hangdog protagonist of The Sound of Silence, has one of those unusual occupations, like “greeting card writer” or “exfiltration specialist,” that’s beloved by screenwriters. Played with straight-faced perfection by Peter Sarsgaard, Lucian is a New York City “house tuner,” which is like a primary care physician for ailing domiciles. With tuning forks as … [Read more...]
‘Mike Wallace Is Here’: Doc of the original grillmaster raises dark questions
The road from Walter Cronkite and his generation of stoic newsreaders to the wild-eyed, pro-wrestling-style rantings of Alex Jones is paved through Mike Wallace. That’s one of the takeaways, not all of them positive and certainly not all hagiographic, that viewers can glean from Mike Wallace Is Here, a complex portrait of the influential TV reporter famous for his … [Read more...]
Moore, Williams lift ‘After the Wedding’ out of its rote-ness
Like the proverbial after-school special, the Lifetime Original Movie is an institution that is summarily dismissed by us snoots in the film-critic intelligentsia. Never mind that most of us have never actually sat through one: to tarnish a major motion picture with a comparison to the network proffering weepies and you-go-girl triumphalism is to deem it unserious and … [Read more...]
‘The Art of Racing in the Rain’: A dog’s breakfast of clichés
The kindest words I can summon about The Art of Racing in the Rain, Disney’s long-awaited adaptation of Garth Stein’s best-selling 2008 airport novel, is that it’s essentially harmless. It’s not a painful experience, and millions will love it unconditionally, as one loves a dog. To pile on about its turgid writing, its artless direction and its hokey, retrograde messaging … [Read more...]
‘Marianne & Leonard’ a tender, complex portrait of a poet and his muse
Documentarian Nick Broomfield is the auteur of the dead musician. He’s the conspiracy-minded chronicler of the pop visionary taken too soon, whose title subjects may or may not be separated by ampersands. Though he has enjoyed a long and influential career in Direct Cinema dating back to the early ’70s, he first appeared on my radar with 1998’s Kurt & Courtney, a … [Read more...]
‘Reports on Sarah and Saleem’: The end of the affair is politics
In the movies, as sometimes in life, thinking with one’s loins instead of one’s brain is a recipe for fatalism, for broken families, for dead rabbits strung up in closets. Like a computer virus infecting our operating system, it overrides our better judgment. Sarah (Sivane Kretchner), the unhappily married, upper-middle-class Israeli café owner in Muayad Alayan’s grim … [Read more...]