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Penelope
On one level, Enda Walsh’s PENELOPE is just a modernization of an episode from The Odyssey. Four suitors – living at the bottom of a drained out swimming pool on Odysseus’s Adriatic estate – vie for the affections of Penelope in advance of her husband’s homecoming – finally! – from the Trojan War. They continue…
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Mesrine
MESRINE Parts 1 & 2 is a strangely compelling cinematic event, which seems the word to describe anything in the theater that requires a double commitment. I saw the parts on subsequent days but had the timing been different would have happily taken an intermission or lunch break on a single day. The anti-hero was…
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The American • Up in the Air
Seeing THE AMERICAN made me read the book on which it is based. Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman turned out to be a passable thriller that has its moments but pales in comparison to the film. The movie is a taut, perfectly paced and morally ambiguous character study that, by making the central figure…
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Inception
Christopher Nolan‘s INCEPTION. The themes are familiar. Think Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, even Calderón, Cervantes, Shakespeare. Dreams within dreams, life as a dream, the universe dreamed by the maker. The filmmaking is deft, the timing exquisite, the rhythms gripping. Yes, there are the expected twists (or not) and the predictable ending…
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I Am Love • Everyone Else
I AM LOVE grows on you. In some respects it tells a straightforward story of love, family and infidelity. In others, it is oblique and enigmatic, like the Resnais and Antonioni films of the ’60s in that there seems always to be something vital but unspoken beyond the explicit plot, forever implicit, never stated or…
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Ondine
The trailer for ONDINE does not even try to capture the delicacy of Neil Jordan‘s new film, which is more lyrical and poetic than suspenseful and melodramatic. Myths and fairy tales are not so much accounts of fancifully impossible events as patterns of experience that provide insight into the quotidian by seeming to defy the…
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Love Ranch
At its best, LOVE RANCH feels like some forgotten classic of ’70s Americana, an abandoned stepchild of Peter Bogdonavich or Bob Rafelson, with a dash of Roger Corman thrown in. There is a kind of nostalgic pleasure to be had in the affection it evinces for the kitsch and vulgarity that was at one time…
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Festival de otoño en primavera
I saw three shows at Madrid’s eccentrically named FESTIVAL DE OTOÑO EN PRIMAVERA (Fall Festival in Springtime), which brought a plethora of international theater to the Spanish capital in May and June. My listening comprehension of Spanish is what it is, so I would not pretend to have followed every thread of the multiple plots…
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The City of Your Final Destination
THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION is the first Merchant Ivory film to be released without the involvement of the late Ismail Merchant. Cinephiles have not always favored the determinedly literary and so, the argument goes, un-cinematic Merchant-Ivory franchise (James Ivory being its other half), but I have usually found the bookish pace engrossing and…
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Chloe
I have not always liked Atom Egoyan, but, as he did in The Sweet Hereafter, he drew me in and held me with his new, and very substantial, thriller. Although CHLOE is a genre film, it is remarkably unpredictable, making conventions we know from Hitchcock and De Palma seem fresh and distinctive. Toronto in winter…