This fiercely iconoclastic western uses many tropes from that cinematic genre, from the classics of John Ford to the more recent idioms of Sergio Leone, but the references are merely window dressing. Part comedy, part tragedy, part feminist manifesto, and all engrossing, it subverts expectations at every turn while delivering a film that refuses to be pigeonholed.
HEREDITY
The only thing wrong with HEREDITY is that is bound to spawn increasingly inferior installments in a new franchise that is as inevitable as its protagonists’ descent into madness. That aside, this deeply disturbing horror film does not need the supernatural in order to worm its way into the darkest recesses of your psyche where… Read More »
AMERICAN ANIMALS
Click here to listen to the interview with Bart Layton. At a pivotal moment in Bart Layton’s emotionally charged AMERICAN ANIMALS, a character looks out of the car in which he is riding and sees the real person on whom he is based staring back at him as the car glides by. It’s not a… Read More »
BEIRUT
BEIRUT opens before the Lebanese Civil War with U.S. diplomat Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm), on the last good day of his life, using a brilliant analogy to explain the political situation in Lebanon to his party guests in that eponymous city. Even the way the guests have arranged themselves, as Skiles put it: Christians on… Read More »
UNSANE
For me, the single most disconcerting image in a Steven Soderbergh film is from CONTAGION. It’s not a panorama of people dying from the pandemic that threatens to end civilization as we know it, instead it’s the silent, dispassionately clinical shot of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head being autopsied. There are people I know who reference the… Read More »
NOSTALGIA
Click here for the flashback interview with Mark Pellington for THE LAST WORD. Polynesians have a word for the power with which we imbue inanimate objects. Manu. There are supernatural overtones to the word’s meaning in its original sense, but the power that objects have for the characters in Mark Pellington’s NOSTALGIA, if not strictly… Read More »
THE PARTY
It begins with Kristen Scott-Thomas, in stark black-and-white, answering her door, hair askew, elegance frayed, eyes wild. She points a handgun right at the camera.
MOM AND DAD
The refrain of “I’ll kill you” or “My mom (dad) is gonna kill me” are a familiar part contemporary familiar discourse in even the most loving of homes. Writer/director Brian Taylor has taken that commonplace and spun a tale that is both wickedly twisted and unnervingly satisfying. The exactly proportions of those two feelings may… Read More »
HOSTILES
HOSTILES is a film that takes itself very seriously. It should. Taking as its themes both human nature’s capacity for violence and its overweening need for mercy, it is not something to be approached lightly, something that director Scott Cooper took to heart in his adaptation of the late Donald E. Stewart’s manuscript. Set in… Read More »
ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD
The rich, as the oft-quoted saw goes, are different. That is the central premise of ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, a cautionary tale of money and family. The moving force, though only a supporting player in the proceedings, J. Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer), who at one point reminisces about a book he wrote entitled… Read More »
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