You have to wade through a great deal of treacle in GRAN TURISMO before you get to part of the film that really works. Based (very loosely) on the true story of the gamer who became a race car driver, the first act plays like a very well executed cliché, albeit with a superbly edited… Read More »
GOLDA
GOLDA does not take the traditional route in telling the story of the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Instead, it focuses on the defining moment of her political career, a moment that made her, in the closing coda to the film, a hero abroad and controversial in her own country. It is a portrait etched… Read More »
OPPENHEIMER
Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER demands that we consider the father of the atomic bomb’s life in context, the which he does with stunning clarity considering the paradoxes the film considers. Like the quantum world revealed by the new physics that Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) brought to the United States between the world wars, things can work even… Read More »
THE LESSON
There are murky waters, literally and figuratively, in THE LESSON, a languid tragedy of manners about family dynamics and career neuroses. At its center are Liam Somers (Daryl McCormack), a brilliant literature tutor struggling to complete his first novel, and the subject of Liam’s Oxford thesis, the revered writer, J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant). To… Read More »
KANDAHAR
KANDAHAR has the virtue of being more than a quotidian action tale of espionage and its attendant machinations. By taking a brooding rather than kinetic approach, it becomes a bittersweet meditation on, as one character sums up very neatly, the idea that modern wars are not meant to be won. The implications of that provide… Read More »
JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4
What is most striking about JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4, and JW:C4 is a very striking film, is how emotionally engaging it is as is goes about the business of filling the screen to bursting with gloriously choreographed, ultra-violent action sequences. What in other films of this ilk would provide a paper-thin motivation for its protagonists… Read More »
INSIDE
If INSIDE were a short film, anything up to the Academy™ definition of same, which is to say, 40 minutes or less including the credits, it would be an incisive deconstruction of art as commerce rather than aesthetics driven by a powerful performance by Willem Dafoe. Instead, it runs for 1 hour and 45 minutes,… Read More »
65
65 is that most satisfying of CGI films, the type that doesn’t wallow in what it can do visually, but rather uses the technology in furtherance of a moving film. It posits a visit to our planet 65 million years ago by humans who arrive at a momentous moment for our big blue marble. The… Read More »
EMILY
EMILY begins with its titular character, Emily Brontë (Emma Mackey) swooning. It’s a cleverly deceptive beginning to the story of a 19th-century rebel, and of the inspirations for her masterpiece of gothic fiction, Wuthering Heights. As played by Mackey, with an immersive and experiential script by screenwriter, Frances O’Connor, Emily is anything but the delicate,… Read More »
KNOCK AT THE CABIN
Perhaps it’s having a child at the center of a film that provides M. Night Shyamalan with the added spark necessary to making a solid, thoroughly enjoyable film. I refer not just to THE SIXTH SENSE, which catapulted the director to rock star filmmaker status, but also to WIDE AWAKE, the film just before that… Read More »
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