Paul Matthews, the character played by Nicolas Cage in the new satire Dream Scenario, is many things: a husband, a father, a tenured professor of evolutionary biology, a font of insecurities and jealousies and resentments. But more than anything, in this strange, heady and ever-shifting polemic, he is a human meme. Paul tends to satisfy both the original scientific … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘The Unknown Country’ a sublime entry in the docufiction pantheon
Expect to be taken aback the first time The Unknown Country, a work of ostensible fiction newly released on DVD and Blu-ray ($22, Music Box), abruptly shifts to a documentary. We’ve just watched an actor, Lily Gladstone, stop at a Deadwood diner after a long night of driving. The camera is focused on her, not the loquacious server at the greasy spoon, who in between dispensing … [Read more...]
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’: Scorsese’s innovatory masterpiece
The autumn of Robert De Niro’s extraordinary career has been a period of prolific emptiness — an assembly-line churn of comedies about dirty and eccentric old men whose titles are as interchangeable as their content. Thank goodness, then, for Martin Scorsese and scant other directors, who still realize that De Niro is a vessel for a certain strand of dark magnetism, a shadowy … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Hardcore’ is an ethnographic odyssey into a bygone culture
If you feel like you need a shower after watching Paul Schrader’s 1979 crime drama Hardcore (newly reissued on Blu-ray, Kino Lorber, $17.42), then the movie has done its job. Skeevy even by Schrader standards, Hardcore germinated the same year as Scrader’s celebrated screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and it feels cut from the same sordid cloth — and imbued with the … [Read more...]
‘Strange Way of Life’: Almodóvar short is fuller than most epics
It’s easy to grumble that, since the ascension of streaming, everything is content now. Art-house films, blockbusters, documentaries, limited series, multi-season dramas, standup specials, even news broadcasts — they’re all items in a queue, presented for your enjoyment or consigned to oblivion on the caprices of an algorithm. Some of them take longer than others to finish, and … [Read more...]
The View From Home: War and resistance in 1960s Paris
The Second World War, and especially the role of ordinary French civilians in resisting Nazi occupation, would repeatedly inspire René Clément, a journeyman director whose travels often took him onto the front lines of anti-fascist action. World War II or its immediate aftermath would inform his best early works (Battle of the Rails, Forbidden Games, The Walls of Malapaga) as … [Read more...]
‘Maps and Legends’: Author chronicles life of seminal indie band R.E.M.
In a storied irony, the band that achieved its highest-charting single with “Losing My Religion” would begin its wobbly launch toward rock superstardom in a church in Athens, Georgia. It was April 5, 1980, at a private birthday party in the city’s former St. Mary’s Episcopal, where 50 people were expected to turn out. Five hundred showed up, standing shoulder to shoulder in … [Read more...]
‘Shortcomings’: Film’s too-clever world misses chance to say something truly memorable
The best compliment I can pay to Randall Park’s Shortcomings is that I would have loved this movie in college. The 20-year-old me would have appreciated the lovesick angst of its central character, an Asian-American film-school dropout named Ben (Justin H. Min) who works at a struggling Berkeley art-house cinema and binges Criterion DVDs at night while trying to reconcile the … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Revel in the enduring 3-D schlock of ‘Robot Monster’
3-D movies, the most stubborn fad in cinema, turned 100 last year. Twenty twenty-two marked the centenary of the unremembered 1922 film The Power of Love, released with dual-strip projection and those familiar anaglyph glasses to a presumably gobsmacked audience of Los Angelenos. The technology has, of course, continued to evolve amid peaks and valleys in its popularity. … [Read more...]
‘Past Lives’: A beautiful, nuanced look at being in the present, and the past
In writer-director Celine Song’s tender triptych Past Lives, set during three segments 12 years apart, time is a wily and unpredictable mistress. Sometimes it goes by in a blip: a simple cut and some onscreen text informing us, in the eternal present tense, “12 years pass.” Then, when the two protagonists, childhood friends finally uniting in adulthood, see one another for … [Read more...]