Like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Nikolaj Arcel’s prestige drama A Royal Affair tells of a real-life arranged marriage between a foreign teenager and a narcissistic monarch, and for a while, it pulses with the same sense of feminist rage. Just as in Antoinette, the new Queen Caroline (Alicia Vikander) doesn’t love the king – that would be Christian VII, of Denmark (Mikkel … [Read more...]
The triumph – and failure – of ‘Cloud Atlas’
There is at least one masterpiece in the bulky, multistoried, socio-political-philosophical edifice known as Cloud Atlas. It’s a narrative set in “neo-Seoul” in the year 2044. In a visionary futurescape somewhere between Blade Runner and The Fifth Element, the world is divided between humans and synthetic, cloned “fabricants,” though the relationship is just another variation … [Read more...]