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Much Ado About Nothing
Joss Whedon’s MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING is something to see, a smart, elegant, fast-moving romantic intrigue filled with the spirit and surprise of the best storytelling. It’s that rare film of a Shakespearean comedy that, without modernizing the language, is utterly comprehensible from the first frame to the last. Kenneth Branagh’s version of the play…
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The East
What I like about Brit Marling, who co-wrote (with director Zal Batmanglij) and stars in THE EAST, is that you can see her thinking, not in a mugging, brow-wrinkling, eyes-going-wide way, but in the faintest modulations of expression, a parted lip, a linger in the look, a shift in the weight. There is something alert…
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Frances Ha
Perhaps the smartest thing about FRANCES HA, which was directed by Noah Baumbach and co-written with Greta Gerwig, is the importance it attaches to the characters in their down time. The film is basically about the young creatives – conventionally known as “hipsters” – who live in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. The title character…
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The Great Gatsby
I saw Baz Luhrmann’s THE GREAT GATSBY through 3D glasses, and I would not have seen it any other way. The whimsical unreality of it, the whole cinematic pop-up book of staggered planes and optically induced kinesthetic illusion, translates not only the novel’s style but its thematic essence. Gatsby is a novella of memory, of…
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Sun Don’t Shine
You know right off from the opening images of Amy Seimetz’s SUN DON’T SHINE that this is another tale of what is called in our political parlance “red America” and its characteristic pathologies: domestic abuse, gun violence, incest, broken homes, and the like, all of which are statistically higher than in the “blue America” that…
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To the Wonder • Tree of Life
There was a time when the spiritual dimension of Terrence Malick’s films was palpable but not in a way that overwhelmed the experience of ordinary life. He portrayed the sort of beauty that any of us can experience in a vast landscape, whether of Midwestern wheat fields or the virgin forests of the New World,…
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Blancanieves
Black-and-white filmmaking can be ravishingly beautiful, and Pablo Berger’s BLANCANIEVES had me from start-to-finish by virtue of its images alone. The title is Spanish for “Snow White,” the story on which the film is based, but also evokes the silvery light out of which it is composed. It caught me in a kind of spell,…
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Todos tenemos un plan
There is an implicit moral cynicism in the title of this engrossing film from Argentina, which in Spanish is called TODOS TENEMOS UN PLAN. We all have a plan, a game to play, a scam, perhaps, things we want and a way to get them. In this film, there are those who want love, money,…
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Stoker
STOKER is creepy. The images are put together in such a way as to make it seem that the full picture is perpetually out of reach. There is always something out of frame, or out of order, or seen only in outline, or out of focus. The truth is out there, but how do we…
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Ginger & Rosa
The pleasure I took in Sally Potter’s GINGER & ROSA was deep, and a little quiet, more the sort that I associate with burying myself in a novel than going to a movie. The film felt as though it might have been semi-autobiographical, a portrait of the filmmaker as a young woman, and a cursory…