How many times can an artist deconstruct his craft and still surprise us? How often can a magician reveal his illusions and still leave us flummoxed? This is the challenge facing M. Night Shyamalan, Hollywood’s most esoteric trickster, as he burrows ever deeper into the cocoon of his cinematic universe, not so much playing to mainstream audiences as to film theorists, comic … [Read more...]
Maddin’s ‘Green Fog’: I left my angst in San Francisco
A work of ecstatic cinephilia run gloriously amok, Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog both is and isn’t a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Climaxing at a brisk 63 minutes and composed entirely of scenes from other movies and TV shows shot in San Francisco — 101 titles made the cut, from more than 200 Maddin viewed for inspiration — The Green Fog is an example of director as … [Read more...]
As critique of the zeitgeist, ‘Vox Lux’ falls flat
Any film that adopts as its subtitle “A Twenty-First Century Portrait” better be profound enough to live up to such a grandiose decree. Writer-director Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux does indeed have millennial zeitgeist on its mind, from the new normal of mass shootings to post-9/11 malaise to the deification of celebrity. But Corbet’s film is a purely academic exercise, written … [Read more...]
‘Vice’ takes on Cheney, but it’s a mess
When I think of actors portraying Vice President Dick Cheney, I’ll always jump to Richard Dreyfuss in W. first. Remember that scene around the war room, when he emerges literally from the shadows and outlines a sinister plot to take Iraq’s oil and establish permanent American hegemony in the Middle East? Dreyfuss didn’t sound much like Cheney — he sounded like Dreyfuss — but … [Read more...]
‘Divide and Conquer’ reveals secrets of Ailes the Dark Lord
Divide and Conquer, documentarian Alexis Bloom’s account of the fractious rise and ignominious fall of the late Roger Ailes, presents its subject as the lonely, fearful and paranoid arsonist of our present political dumpster fire, with delusions of grandeur worthy of Don Quixote and an ego as inflated as the Goodyear blimp. It’s not for nothing that Bloom’s interviewees compare … [Read more...]
Our town, unvarnished: Wiseman’s ‘Monrovia, Indiana’
For a storyteller, a place like Monrovia is the closest they’ll find to a blank page in the sprawling American landscape. The town, in south-central Indiana, boasted a population of 1,063 from the last Census, and its “History” page on Wikipedia is five, mostly short, sentences. One is about a post office, extant since 1834. Another reads “The town is the subject of the … [Read more...]
‘Eternity’s Gate’ takes us to intersection of Van Gogh’s genius, madness
I didn’t think we needed another movie about Vincent Van Gogh, an artist whose life and work have been bewitching auteurs for decades. He’s already received a splashy Hollywood melodrama (Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life), its shambolic, de-dramatized opposite (Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh), and Robert Altman’s meditation on Van Gogh’s relationship with his brother (Vincent & … [Read more...]
The Lady Vanishes: Lee Chang-dong’s masterful, unclassifiable ‘Burning’
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning begins with a meet-cute and ends with a murder. What happens in the middle is a steady, bravura mutation from quirky romance to woozy mystery to psychodrama to stark tragedy, all of it playing magisterially against a changing South Korea. This filmmaker is most famous in the west for his 2010 masterpiece Poetry. If you’ve seen that celebrated … [Read more...]
‘Front Runner’: How we went from statecraft to clickbait
“One good thing, I must say, though, about Trump, [is] he has broken down certain norms we’ve lived with for a long time and didn’t really make sense, like extramarital affairs. I was arguing about that in the Clinton days. It doesn’t really matter. That’s private. They used to say, ‘If he cheats on his wife, is he going to cheat on his country?’ No! You can cheat on your wife … [Read more...]
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ pedestrian — but it will rock you
Bohemian Rhapsody, Bryan Singer’s biopic of Freddie Mercury, is nothing if not a linear recitation of events. The best of Queen’s music approached poetry, but Singer’s film sits comfortably as prose, occasionally the stilted kind. Just look at the first scene after its credit sequence: The young Freddie (Rami Malek), then known by his birth name Farrokh (Bulsara), is one of … [Read more...]