I didn’t think we needed another movie about Vincent Van Gogh, an artist whose life and work have been bewitching auteurs for decades. He’s already received a splashy Hollywood melodrama (Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life), its shambolic, de-dramatized opposite (Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh), and Robert Altman’s meditation on Van Gogh’s relationship with his brother (Vincent & … [Read more...]
The Lady Vanishes: Lee Chang-dong’s masterful, unclassifiable ‘Burning’
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning begins with a meet-cute and ends with a murder. What happens in the middle is a steady, bravura mutation from quirky romance to woozy mystery to psychodrama to stark tragedy, all of it playing magisterially against a changing South Korea. This filmmaker is most famous in the west for his 2010 masterpiece Poetry. If you’ve seen that celebrated … [Read more...]
‘Front Runner’: How we went from statecraft to clickbait
“One good thing, I must say, though, about Trump, [is] he has broken down certain norms we’ve lived with for a long time and didn’t really make sense, like extramarital affairs. I was arguing about that in the Clinton days. It doesn’t really matter. That’s private. They used to say, ‘If he cheats on his wife, is he going to cheat on his country?’ No! You can cheat on your wife … [Read more...]
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ pedestrian — but it will rock you
Bohemian Rhapsody, Bryan Singer’s biopic of Freddie Mercury, is nothing if not a linear recitation of events. The best of Queen’s music approached poetry, but Singer’s film sits comfortably as prose, occasionally the stilted kind. Just look at the first scene after its credit sequence: The young Freddie (Rami Malek), then known by his birth name Farrokh (Bulsara), is one of … [Read more...]
‘Downton Abbey’ settles in at CityPlace for the season
For Anglophiles and fans of the PBS series Downton Abbey, wait no longer – the characters, the costumes, the Old World glamour and melodrama are arriving in South Florida in time for season. Just off a successful New York City run, NBCUniversal International Studios, along with Imagine Exhibitions, is bringing Downton Abbey: The Exhibition to CityPlace in West Palm Beach, … [Read more...]
‘The Oath’: Amid screwball plot, a chilling premise
The Oath is like a George A. Romero film without the zombies — at least not the literal zombies. Put another way, it’s 1984 for 2018, a cautionary tale for a totalitarian future that casts a penetrating gaze at our proto-fascist present. Whatever your literary-cinematic reference point, comedian Ike Barinholtz’s directorial debut is easily the most confrontational, … [Read more...]
‘The Guilty’: One man, one room and the voices inside his head
For most of us who have had the misfortune of calling an emergency dispatch line, the voice on the other end will remain a disembodied presence — a blurry connection in the ether of a crisis. The person’s physical appearance and backstory are immaterial, their relationships to the callers fleeting and impersonal. Part of the genius of The Guilty, the debut feature from … [Read more...]
‘First Man’: An epic flight, grounded in gritty character
As a rule, I try not to pay much attention to the snap polling conducted at the end of advance screenings. But the audience’s tepid response to this week’s preview of First Man was too telling to ignore. The universal round of applause did not greet the final credits, and most of the praise offered at egress was muted and lukewarm. “It was too long” seemed to be the … [Read more...]
Updated ‘Star is Born’ speaks with fresh urgency for new century
“It’s the same story told over and over again,” says Sam Elliott’s character toward the end of Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born. He’s talking about the form of popular music, whose 12 bars inspire endless variations on a shared structure. He could also be talking about A Star is Born itself, Hollywood’s grim, self-critical appraisal of the vagaries of celebrity — first filmed … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2018-19: Fall film
The fall brings a better class of films with it, and particularly so this year with a handful of major directors, like Damien Chazelle, Barry Jenkins and Steve McQueen, checking in with their follow-up releases after such acclaimed efforts as La La Land, Moonlight and 12 Years a Slave. And any season that features a newly completed film by the late Orson Welles has to be … [Read more...]