Perhaps the most amazing thing about Asteroid City is that it actually exists. For the bean counters who fund the movies, eccentricity and experimentation are rarely inspiring motivators to open wallets, as evidenced by the Sisyphean career of Terry Gilliam. But somehow, even though his projects have by no means been consistently successful, Wes Anderson has managed to crack … [Read more...]
‘The Northman’: Revenge pic’s hallucinatory power will go all medieval on you
If Alexander Skarsgård is a Method actor in the pop definition of the term — someone who never breaks character even when the cameras stop — I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere near his quarters in Northern Ireland from August through November 2020, during the shoot for The Northman. God forbid I were a gofer with unpleasant news; say, craft services were out of … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Tommaso’ finds Ferrara, Dafoe through the looking glass
As a work of semi-improvised metafiction set in Rome, Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso (now playing in Virtual Cinemas) is a fragrant cipollini onion inviting us to peel away its layers. Is Willem Dafoe’s titular protagonist, a volatile expat filmmaker with a marriage on the rocks, wrestled from Ferrara’s own troubled biography? Is Dafoe playing a raw version of himself? When he tells … [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...]
As critique of the zeitgeist, ‘Vox Lux’ falls flat
Any film that adopts as its subtitle “A Twenty-First Century Portrait” better be profound enough to live up to such a grandiose decree. Writer-director Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux does indeed have millennial zeitgeist on its mind, from the new normal of mass shootings to post-9/11 malaise to the deification of celebrity. But Corbet’s film is a purely academic exercise, written … [Read more...]
‘Eternity’s Gate’ takes us to intersection of Van Gogh’s genius, madness
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...]