If Alexander Skarsgård is a Method actor in the pop definition of the term — someone who never breaks character even when the cameras stop — I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere near his quarters in Northern Ireland from August through November 2020, during the shoot for The Northman. God forbid I were a gofer with unpleasant news; say, craft services were out of … [Read more...]
‘Adam Project’ gets lost in the Garden of Edenic cliché
Having made it through every CGI explosion, glib one-liner and mawkish revelation of Shawn Levy’s The Adam Project (now on Netflix), I feel I owe Moonfall a partial apology. Roland Emmerich’s bonkers apocalypse picture from earlier this year was an embarrassment on every creative and technical front, but at least it embraced its badness. It seemed, like its self-replicating … [Read more...]
‘Compartment No. 6’: Accidental couple at best when story stays on rails
We’ve read enough mysteries and seen enough thrillers to know by now that, in fiction, by and large, nothing good ever happens on a train. Corpses appear; ladies vanish. Don’t get us started on Snowpiercer. True to form, misery and dread seem to be the traveling companions for Laura (Seidi Haarla), a rudderless Finnish exchange student voyaging solo on a locomotive from … [Read more...]
‘Drive My Car’: When grief leaves you in neutral
If only Paul McCartney earned royalties for mental playbacks, he’d be an even bigger billionaire this Oscar season. I’m sure I’m not alone in taking the Beatle’s libidinous 1965 earworm for a spin around the cerebrum every time I see another headline about Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture. But this Drive My Car, now … [Read more...]
‘Atlantis’: A pitiless Ukrainian postwar dystopia — from 2019
Whether programmed by coincidence or intention, today’s opening of Atlantis at Lake Worth Playhouse offers, like most great science fiction, a harrowing and prescient reflection on our present moment. Director Valentyn Vasyanovych’s sophomore feature, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, is set in Eastern Ukraine in 2025, “one year after the war.” It’s … [Read more...]
‘Worst Person in the World’: Trier’s entrancing look at a woman unbound
The trailer for the Norwegian Oscar hopeful The Worst Person in the World is my favorite kind of teaser, the kind that says nothing about the story. Some cryptic dialogue is exchanged; a woman runs through an empty street in a fugue of exaltation; a carpet rushes headlong to meet her as she falls prostrate onto it. We know nothing of the plot, but we’re primed for something … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Restored ‘La Dolce Vita’ laughs all the way to the apocalypse
There may be no better example of a film’s prologue forecasting its themes than the exhilarating aperitif that opens La Dolce Vita. A helicopter, its heavy cargo suspended from wires, delivers a statue of Christ to its final destination in St. Peter’s Square. Trailed by a second copter of tabloid reporters and photographers, the spectacle traverses an ancient Roman aqueduct, … [Read more...]
‘Power of the Dog’ leads Oscars race
Powerful is the word for The Power of the Dog, a contemporary, revisionist Western that streamed on Netflix, which led the field when Academy Award nominations were announced this morning. It galloped away with 12 nominations, including best picture, director (Jane Campion), actor (Benedict Cumberbatch), supporting actors (Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee), supporting … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A shattering colonialist neo-Western, and ennui on the French Riviera
The most innovative foreign-language films often are not the ones jostling for the five coveted slots on the Academy Award ballot. They’re the films with miniscule if any distribution, that drop on DVD or a streaming service with little fanfare. Memory House (Film Movement, $24.95 DVD, $3.99 digital rental), the stunning debut from Brazilian writer-director João Paulo … [Read more...]
‘Scream’: Self-referential pose dulls slasher’s edge
Perhaps the most enduring innovation from Wes Craven’s original Scream (1996) is its acknowledgement of its existence within the continuum of horror movies, both the classics to the schlock that preceded it. For at least two decades prior, in every monocellular slasher that oozed red paint in every midnight-movie ghetto and fading VHS tape, the teenage automatons passing … [Read more...]