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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…
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The Future
I missed this in New York and was intrigued but somewhat doubtful as to how I would feel about it. So I was glad to have the chance to see it in Madrid with the added interest of Spanish subtitles. I need not have worried. Miranda July’s THE FUTURE is eccentrically lovely, a small act…
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The Hermitage in the Prado
THE HERMITAGE IN THE PRADO was not an overwhelmingly memorable exhibit, but agreeable in scale and very interesting. I’m not big on gold artifacts, but looked at plenty of intricately crafted items, and some intriguing and architecturally precise paintings of the Hermitage itself. There’s a good modernist selection. I especially liked seeing a female “Absinthe…
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A Dangerous Method
A DANGEROUS METHOD is the film version of a play version of a book about the schism between Freud and Jung and the role played in it by a young woman who was Jung’s patient, student and lover. It is also, as such, a pleasant surprise. On one level, the lines seem stage-bound and almost…
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Sleeping Beauty
I should say that this is not wholesome holiday fare. Julia Leigh‘s SLEEPING BEAUTY is a sort of Australian feminist manifestation of a genre that I associate with French directors such as Catherine Breillat (who has directed a film of the same title) and Jean-Claude Brisseau, which dissects non-normative or perverse sexual behavior in a…
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NYC Aerial Dance Festival
Anyone who would like to see an exuberant bungee cord homage to the music of Tom Waits, drunk on circus and carnival and cheap whiskey and wobbly barstools and splintered boardwalks, has one more chance tomorrow night at Manhattan Movement and Arts Center. The name of the piece is “A Window In” and it is…
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Anonymous
What if anything to say about ANONYMOUS? I can say that I enjoyed it well enough without thinking it great. That although a legitimate argument can be made for Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as the author of the plays that are called Shakespeare’s, the film does not make anything like one…
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Blackthorn
The myth of the American West, is, in Mateo Gil‘s BLACKTHORN, with an ingenious screenplay by Miguel Barros, still rugged and romanticized in its values, has neither loosened its grip on the imagination nor escaped the fog of nostalgia. One wonders what input Sam Shepard, in the leading role but also a master playwright on…
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Mysteries of Lisbon • Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl
MYSTERIES OF LISBON, four hours and an intermission from Raúl Ruiz, is in the best Iberian-Mediterranean tradition of tales within tales within tales (think Don Quijote or The 1001 Nights), each revealing that reality is a little different than was known before. There are beauties to be had here, and moments of wit, and a…
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Age of Consent • The Tempest
I came to Norman Lindsay’s witty, wise and wily novel AGE OF CONSENT through the effervescent film of the same name that the great Michael Powell directed in 1969. Some have spotted a connection to Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the plot, which concerns a painter struggling to find inspiration on an isolated Australian isle accompanied…