The setting of Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s dread-inducing new film Die My Love is a country house in Montana. It’s not a huge place, but it’s a sizable upgrade for a young, artistic couple from New York City to create, to make love, to refashion in their image. It’s the perfect, isolated space for him to make music, and for her to write the next Great American Novel. Maybe … [Read more...]
Bleak ‘Lighthouse’ puts masculinity, audience to test
Fade in on an evening commute. We’re on the ocean, vast and pitiless. Framed against the ominous soundtrack of a foghorn’s elephantine bellow, a dinghy comes into focus, making its incremental progress with two stoic men behind the wheel. Their destination: oblivion. More literally, these rugged individuals — Robert Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow and Willem Dafoe’s Thomas Wake … [Read more...]
Denis’ ‘High Life’ an arty space id-yssey
At first blush, High Life seems to be about a single father trying to raise an infant child in inhospitable conditions — in this case, outer space. As in the home, objects aboard his rectangular, wood-paneled spacecraft fail, and Monte (Robert Pattinson) must tend to them while monitoring his baby, always on alert in fronts both personal and existential. His daughter’s … [Read more...]
Visual poetry gives ‘Lost City of Z’ its epic passport
Depending on whom you ask, director James Gray (We Own the Night, The Immigrant) is either his generation’s Kubrick — a dogged, uncompromising auteur of narcotized mood pieces — or a ponderous, inert storyteller with an elegant camera eye. Whatever your opinion of the polarizing filmmaker, he’s an unlikely choice for The Lost City of Z (pronounced “zed”), an adaptation of … [Read more...]