The last time Scarlett Johansson traversed a void of frame-filling darkness, she was a voluptuous alien consuming eager men like so much protein in 2013’s Under the Skin. In the opening fade-in of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, she is once again a figure framed in absolute blackness, a light emerging from its absence in glorious medium shot. It’s almost religious, like one … [Read more...]
‘The Dead Don’t Die’: A love letter to zombie movies
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...]
‘Paterson’: A bus-driving Virgil guides us through the quotidian
Most of Jim Jarmusch’s best movies are journey films, charting a character’s movements between two points — geographic but also spiritual and temporal. The more protracted the route, the stranger and better the movie. So it is with Paterson, which follows, with Bressonian simplicity and Akermanesque repetition, a week in the life of a Paterson, N.J., bus driver also named … [Read more...]