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...]
Poignant look at dementia screens Wednesday in Delray
When West Palm Beach filmmaker Eric Gordon moved back in with his parents to help care for his father, who was starting to show signs of dementia, he did not expect it to become the subject of his next documentary. But six years later, he completed When All That’s Left Is Love and now he is busy traveling the country, showing his handiwork at film festivals and racking up … [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...]