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...]
‘Yesterday’: Fixing a memory hole, rom-com style
Back in April, I interviewed Daniel Hartwell, founder of the inaugural Beatles on the Beach Festival, which would soon descend on Delray Beach. I asked him to reflect on why the Beatles remain so perennially popular, with generation after generation. He answered, in part, “the music, if it were to come out today, would be a hit. It would be alternative rock.” Yesterday, a … [Read more...]
Woodstock doc: The friends we all need a little help from
Like the seasoned storyteller he is, documentarian Barak Goodman opens his new film Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation in media res, with the most alarming visuals and most calamitous sound bites he can muster. “Everything that could possibly go wrong was happening,” we’re informed, as rain clouds darken the teeming throng of 400,000 hippies on Woodstock’s … [Read more...]
‘The Dead Don’t Die’: A love letter to zombie movies
In Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, the zombie apocalypse rustles yawningly but determinedly to fruition in Centerville, an anonymous American hamlet, population 738. The omens, initially disparate and disconnected, begin to cohere into an existential collapse: Wild animals flee, and pets attack their owners. The sun is still out at 9 at night, and the next evening it’s … [Read more...]
Herzog’s encounter with Gorbachev respectful, revelatory
When Michel Gondry directed Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?, his offbeat 2013 interview documentary of Noam Chomsky, he was clear about the project’s particular timing. Gondry wanted to fast-track the movie because, frankly, he wanted enough time with Noam while his subject was still alive. Though it’s never delineated as bluntly, a similar sense of temporal urgency permeates … [Read more...]
‘Non-Fiction’: What we talk (and talk and talk) about
When is there too much of a good thing? This question looms over Olivier Assayas’s exhaustively intelligent Non-Fiction, a zeitgeist-targeted ensemble comedy stuffed with so many statements about the Way We Live Now that we can hardly be expected to process them all. Assayas’ script is like a torrent of Snapchat missives that disappear into the nether, to be replaced by the … [Read more...]
‘Journey to a Mother’s Room’: Masterful character study illumines quiet lives
The Spanish import Journey to a Mother’s Room opens on a two-shot that wordlessly crystallizes the relationship between its characters. The mom of the title, Estrella (Lola Dueñas), is asleep on her sofa next to her slumbering daughter, Leonor (Anna Castillo), a young woman of indeterminate age but who is certainly too old to share a makeshift bed with her mother. They’re even … [Read more...]
‘Charlie Says’: Yesterday’s, and today’s, American psycho
As Charles Manson well understood, the flipside of the revolutionary liberation movements of the Sixties is authoritarian control; the obverse of communism, fascism. Or, as Orwell phrased it so succinctly some two decades prior, freedom is slavery. The two-faced duality of this charismatic psychopath is at the heart of Mary Harron’s Charlie Says, a slow-burning, rewarding … [Read more...]
Charming ‘Long Shot’ stays on political sidelines
To the extent old-fashioned print advertisements sell us anything in the age of social media and viral video, Long Shot’s theatrical release poster is curiously misleading. In it, stars Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron stare at their outstretched hands, their smiles wide and baked, underneath the text “Feel Something Different.” You don’t need to have swallowed a Molly … [Read more...]
Denis’ ‘High Life’ an arty space id-yssey
At first blush, High Life seems to be about a single father trying to raise an infant child in inhospitable conditions — in this case, outer space. As in the home, objects aboard his rectangular, wood-paneled spacecraft fail, and Monte (Robert Pattinson) must tend to them while monitoring his baby, always on alert in fronts both personal and existential. His daughter’s … [Read more...]