Where has The Shout been all my life? It’s taken 25 years into my personal moviegoing odyssey, thanks to a sparkling new edition from Criterion ($31.96 Blu-ray), to discover that Jerzy Skolimowski’s slippery 1978 psychodrama may as well have been engineered in a lab to satisfy my taste in 1970s arthouse cinema. In combining the wide-open spaces and enigmatic existentialism … [Read more...]
‘Musk’: Four-hour doc of tyrant as a hollow man isn’t long enough
Four hours of Elon Musk is --- well, it’s a lot, you might think. A hotter take might be that it’s not enough. As filmmaker Alex Gibney argues in his epic documentary Musk, the world’s richest man is using his historic wealth to impact global life on an incalculable scale. Unhurriedly and methodically, like a prosecutor building his case, Gibney casts Musk — who, in an … [Read more...]
‘Primetime’: Where the only reality is gotcha host’s warped psyche
Given Lance Oppenheim’s background in documentaries, one would be forgiven for expecting his new Chris Hansen biopic, Primetime, to hew to a naturalism akin to his usual form. It may be a starry feature film, but surely it will be grounded in an unimpeachable nonfiction aesthetic, maybe even combining real footage with recreations and erasing distinctions between the … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Hell’s Highway’ unearths the morbid history of the driver’s-ed shock doc
The scariest thing I saw on television as a child was an episode of the animated G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero in which seemingly solid characters melt into a purplish ooze. I learn now, on the interwebs, that the episode was a Twilight Zone-inspired two-parter called “There’s No Place Like Springfield,” and that my terror as an 8- or 9-year-old was shared by many. The … [Read more...]
The View from Home: Ozon’s bold adaptation of “The Stranger” luxuriates in ambiguity
As in the source material, the beauty of the title of François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger (Music Box, $27.96 Blu-ray, $23.96 DVD) is that it can refer to any number of its players. Surely there’s the mysterious protagonist, the emotionally inert Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), whose office job is as undefined as his first name, a hallmark of existentialist … [Read more...]
Film historian sees art form as enabler of fascism
Did the movies sleepwalk us into the elections of Donald Trump? This provocative question hides in plain sight throughout A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, British film historian David Thomson’s unsettling and often downbeat new book, his 45th on the art form he loves — or, perhaps, loved until very recently. The obtrusive shadow of the 47th … [Read more...]
Wilde shines as director, actor in ‘The Invite’
Any couple considering attending a screening of Olivia Wilde’s racy new dramedy The Invite should be forewarned. For all of its effective humor and risqué dialogue, the film is a certifiable anti-date movie, part of a cinematic lineage of dyspeptic relationships that stretches back to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Scenes from a Marriage and Husbands and Wives. As in these … [Read more...]
The View From Home: The lost debut from a formative figure in the French New Wave
It gives me a small pleasure to recall that the French New Wave, one of the most important artistic movements in world cinema, began in a critical journal years before any of its alums would film their first features. Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol launched their careers as critics for Cahiers du Cinema, a film magazine launched in 1951. … [Read more...]
‘Disclosure Day’: Vital viewing, and not just for ET aficionados
Disclosure Day may be a more important movie than a successful one. This isn’t to say that Steven Spielberg’s latest dive into what ET enthusiasts refer to as “the phenomenon” is not, by and large, a successful work of both art and entertainment. It means that its cultural impact, which should be galvanizing and could be volcanic, far outweighs the typical barometers of … [Read more...]
The View From Home: An American indie auteur’s raw and controversial 16mm debut
For most audiences, writer-director Ira Sachs first landed on their radars with the 2005 independent drama Forty Shades of Blue. The film introduced the patient style, realistic approach to dialogue and nuanced treatment of adult relationships — gay and straight alike — that would resurface throughout a mostly unimpeachable filmography. Keep the Lights On, Love is Strange, … [Read more...]