In the opening minutes of Eating Animals, as a car drives through miles of unspoiled farmland, plaintive music plants us firmly in the fertile breadbasket of America —land of opportunity, land of natural beauty, land of plenty. Ah, but what a false promise it is. Look a little deeper, and that pink-hued body of water isn’t a natural spring; it’s a pool of hog urine and fecal … [Read more...]
‘En El Séptimo Día’: A slice of migrant life on the margins
On the seventh day, as one best-seller has put it, God rested from all His work which He had done. José (Fernando Cardona), the vacillating hero of En El Séptimo Día, does not have that luxury. His seventh day, which indeed falls on a Sunday, is fraught with an existential crisis. José, an undocumented immigrant from Puebla, Mexico, now living in Brooklyn, is a soccer … [Read more...]
‘American Animals’: Masters of the bungle-verse
For a short time in late 2004, the story was catnip to Kentucky media. Three students — and one college dropout — from Lexington’s Transylvania University attempted a rare-book heist that, to put it mildly, did not go as planned. To say much more about the results would do a disservice to the nervy suspense of Bart Layton’s American Animals, which dramatizes the young men’s … [Read more...]
‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?’: The lasting goodness of a gentle progressive
The television I enjoyed as a kid lurches from the requisite Sesame Street to the mindless distractions of G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Animaniacs, Ren & Stimpy and the green slime of many a Nickelodeon game show, with its slapstick schadenfreude. If there was any room for Fred Rogers’ earnest blend of puppet show and talk therapy, I have no memory of it. His iconic … [Read more...]
Like the season, ‘Summer 1993’ is a golden treasure
For most films seeking a mass audience, the best we can hope for is that they leave some time for reflection amid the whizzes and bangs, the laugh lines and shock cuts. Catalan director Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 is all reflection, a childhood memory film as vividly realized as Carlos Saura’s Cria Cuervos!, but with a style and circumspection that are all Simón’s own. This … [Read more...]
Faith of the father, test of our time: Schrader’s powerful ‘First Reformed’
The setting for much of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is a white Dutch Colonial church, simple and sturdy and indistinguishable from the thousands of similar structures that punctuate America’s hills and hollers, its exurbs and suburbs. The chapel, First Reformed in upstate New York, is situated near Abundant Life, a pyrotechnic megachurch with live-streamed sermons and … [Read more...]
Scary monsters: This ‘Beast’ isn’t just another Moll
For Moll (Jessie Buckley), the rebellious, unstable 27-going-on-17-year-old at the center of Beast, Pascal is her knight in earthen armor. It’s her birthday in the movie’s opening moments, but she’d rather be elsewhere. Upstaged at her barbecue party by her flawless sister’s announcement of twin buns in the oven, she flees to a bar, drinks herself stupid, and dances all night … [Read more...]
The prime of Ms. Juliette: ‘Let the Sunshine In’ offers an earthy, real heroine
Many of the most award-winning screenplays of both the classical and modern era are also among the archest and most self-conscious. After all, as much as I admire all of them, nobody talks like they do in Aaron Sorkin or Quentin Tarantino or Coen Brothers or Joseph L. Mankiewicz scripts. Their dialogue is flashy, eccentric, aspirational. Rarely is someone struck speechless in … [Read more...]
‘Measure of a Man’ teaches from a tired book of clichés
Blake Cooper, who plays the overweight and vulnerable teenager at the heart of the here’s-what-I-learned-on-my-summer-vacation movie Measure of a Man, has a future playing beta males. With his combination of smarts and insecurities, in due time he’ll start to land the roles that Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera are starting to age out of, the sort that John Cusack typified the … [Read more...]
‘Godard Mon Amour’ depicts renowned auteur with real humor
Like writing a traditional biography about James Joyce, composing a conventional symphony in honor of John Cage, or painting a realistic portrait of Picasso, directing a standard narrative feature about Jean-Luc Godard risks alienating the very audience that would consume the — yes, I’ll say it — product. Squaring experimentalists into familiar forms insults their genius. Or … [Read more...]