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...]
‘Teen Spirit’: A star is boring
Is Teen Spirit a legitimate feature film? Or is it 92 minutes of glistening YouTube content masquerading as one? If ever there was a movie that asked to be played on shuffle, it’s this milquetoast product predictably charting the stumbles and triumphs of the Darwinian world of competition television. It’s presented as a celebration of the hollow, plastic style of pop music … [Read more...]
‘Diane’: Wise and lyrical, with a star turn from Place
Kent Jones is far from the first writer to make the transition from critic to filmmaker, from outsider to insider, from lobber of bromides to defender of craft. James Agee directed a short, and penned The African Queen and Night of the Hunter; Roger Ebert wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls; the French New Wave was a cottage industry of trailblazing … [Read more...]
‘Transit’: Waiting for a visa from a city dreamed by Kafka
We hear the sirens before anything else, wailing against a black screen. Emergency vehicles glide through the streets of Paris, and authority figures in riot gear patrol the streets, but nobody seems to notice. They’re shopping, eating at cafes, willfully blind that fascism is creeping up on them, more and more each day. They’re content that for the moment, at least, … [Read more...]