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Damsels in Distress • Lola Versus
I have enjoyed Whit Stillman’s deadpan social satire over the years, and I think Greta Gerwig is just great, and I liked Analeigh Tipton a lot in this, and I love the insular charm of college campuses, and I wanted to like DAMSELS IN DISTRESS for all of those reasons, and, well, I didn’t quite,…
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Elles
I went to this for Juliette Binoche, who is my choice for the finest international film actress of her generation. She does not disappoint. But ELLES, even though it traverses familiar thematic territory, is worth seeing in its own right. Binoche plays a journalist who is interviewing female university students who make ends meet working…
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4:44 • Melancholia
The last day on earth, if it were known in advance and calculated to the minute, would surely be the greatest case of a watched pot never boiling in history, until, of course, it did. With 4:44: THE LAST DAY ON EARTH, Abel Ferrara perfectly captures the strange combination of ennui, anxiety, wonder, fear, panic, and…
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Silent House
The advance notices have been a bit unfair to Chris Kentis and Laura Lau‘s SILENT HOUSE. They have made it impossible to experience the film’s aesthetic structure – it was ostensibly shot in real time and in a single take – as one might have without having had prior knowledge of the device. Rather than…
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Hugo
Judging by HUGO, 3D has come a long way since The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which, if you see it in revival, is a fun glimpse of ’50s pop history, but as cinema, well… Counterintuitively, 3D doesn’t make a two-dimensional movie seem more like the three-dimensional universe. On the contrary, it creates a certain…
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Shame
In the most memorable scene in Steve McQueen‘s SHAME, Carey Mulligan sings a version of “New York, New York” stripped of romanticism and false promise, utterly resigned to the fact that she will probably not make it, here or anywhere. The close-up on her is punctuated by two or three perfectly positioned cutaways to the…
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Crazy Horse
Frederick Wiseman‘s documentary about a Parisian erotic dance club, which I went to upon hearing of its profound sociological content from the New York Times, is every bit as engrossing as promised. I did not need to be sold on its central premise, that nude, or partially nude, dancing can be seriously artistic. That has…
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Coriolanus
My suspicion is that a lot of people would find this film version of Shakespeare’s CORIOLANUS to be tough going, and for a good ways into it, I was one of them. The early images struck me as heavy-handedly pacifist, modernized and uncoupled from Shakespeare, who is wise on the subject of war but hardly…
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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
I have no doubt that, if compelled under pain of death and force of arms to watch Meryl Streep play Maggie – or, somewhat more willingly, to see Michelle Williams portray the pitch-perfect Marilyn – that I would still, if given a vote in the Oscar race, cast mine for Rooney Mara in THE GIRL…
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Drive
The restrained and atmospheric DRIVE, which stars both Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, was the perfect fix for my addiction to a certain type of offbeat thriller. There is familiar and seductive formula to it. Find an actual profession (in this case stunt driving) and transpose it to the world of criminal enterprise (in this…