MOVIE REVIEW
Post Tenebras Lux (2012)
56th BFI London Film Festival
Terrence Malick has a lot to answer for. Carlos Reygadas has apparently been the first — although certainly not the last — director to watch “The Tree of Life” and say, “Hey! I also have a biographical story which can make a vague point of the interconnectedness of the world we live in!”
For the first 15 minutes or so of “Post Tenebras Lux,” this is an excellent idea. A toddler makes her way through a muddy field, alone except for some cows and dogs, as night falls and an incredible thunderstorm rolls in. The little girl in her bright coat — with the sky and lightning flashes reflected in the puddles beneath her feet — is as striking as anything world cinema has seen for some time. But this astonishing opening sequence presages two things: an uncomfortable mix of fiction and reality and a disconcerting blend of image and substance.
Continue reading “An Impressionist Family Portrait” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Great Expectations (2012)
Johan Persson/56th BFI London Film Festival
Charles Dickens’s novel has been required reading for years, with varying levels of success. Modern 14-year-olds often struggle with the flowery Victorian language and find it difficult to see the very current emotions underneath. Many children will seize upon this movie gratefully. In that sense this new adaptation is a tremendous success. In very many other ways, this is a story that has been told before.
Continue reading “All’s Fair in Love and Class War” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Rust and Bone (2012)
Roger Arpajou/Sony Pictures Classics
Jacques Audiard knows how to inhabit the body. In his films he manages to bring us inside the bodies of his characters so that we can also feel what they are feeling. But not really their emotions — Mr. Audiard has less time for emotions than almost any other filmmaker currently working. What he is somehow able to convey is the actual physical sensation of swimming in the ocean, dancing in a nightclub or hitting someone in the head.
Continue reading “Twist of Fates” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Sightseers (2012)
Ben Wheatley/IFC Films
If an Englishman’s home is his castle, then it follows that the English countryside is his kingdom. His enjoyment of the countryside is his democratic right, but this is made much, much more difficult when other Englishmen get in the way. “Sightseers” explores one way of solving this problem in the least pleasant possible way.
Continue reading “A Romantic Getaway, With Murder” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Ginger & Rosa (2012)
Nicola Dove/56th BFI London Film Festival
Sally Potter has always been famous for making movies considered unmakable. “Ginger & Rosa” is her determined attempt to enter the mainstream by telling a straightforward story in a straightforward — albeit minimalist — way. Her instincts as a filmmaker for style, sound and faces are as sharp as ever, but she seems to have forgotten that sometimes the most direct way of making a point is by going in a roundabout way.
Continue reading “A World on the Brink, a Friendship Tested” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Wuthering Heights (2011)
Agatha Nitecka/Oscilloscope Laboratories
With “Wuthering Heights,” Andrea Arnold confirms herself as the most important directing talent to emerge from Britain since Stephen Daldry and Sam Mendes. She has also achieved this via an unconventional path: by winning an Oscar with a live-action short film (2003’s “Wasp”), working under the restrictions of Dogme (2006’s “Red Road”), building a movie around a pregnant teenager found having a screaming argument with her boyfriend in a train station (Katie Jarvis from 2009’s “Fish Tank”) and now “Wuthering Heights.” Once again, Ms. Arnold has crafted something amazing by working primarily with nonprofessional actors and shooting on location, this time on the Yorkshire moors.
Continue reading “The Foster Home Straight” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Inbetweeners (2011)
Nicola Dove/Wrekin Hill Entertainment
One of the reasons that Europe is better than North America is a lower drinking age. In Britain, one can be served beer with a meal (a packet of potato chips counts) from the age of 16; on the continent, you are allowed beer and wine without restriction but must wait until 18 or 21, depending on the country, before being legally allowed spirits. No one, of course, lies to get around it. This means that British teenagers have the full spring break experience at 18 in Mediterranean resorts such as Malia in Crete and Magaluf in Spain, where “The Inbetweeners” was filmed. And yet somehow no one had previously thought to make a movie of the whole vomit-covered, Red-Bull-and-vodka-soaked, dance-music-scored mess which was both suitable for the international market and starring actual teenagers.
Continue reading “Adolescence Hangover” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Rock of Ages (2012)
David James/Warner Brothers Pictures
The first 30 or so minutes of “Rock of Ages” are as much fun as Hollywood has allowed itself to have lately. Unfortunately, the movie then makes the classic mistake by most rock bands in the middle of a show: It switches the pace to a bunch of boring ballads.
But to set the scene: Country girl Sherrie (Julianne Hough) walks off a bus onto the Sunset Strip in 1987 and immediately meets Drew (Diego Boneta), a barback at the famous rock club The Bourbon Room. Drew convinces his bosses, Dennis (Alec Baldwin) and Lonny (Russell Brand), to hire Sherrie, which makes her first day the last show of famed band Arsenal before its lead singer Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise) goes solo. Dennis needs the Arsenal show to go well, as the club is under threat from protestors led by the mayor’s wife Patricia (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Stacee has his own problems: His manager (Paul Giamatti) is a tool; he has to be interviewed by Constance (Malin Åkerman) for Rolling Stone, and no one likes his pet baboon. And these plot turbulences are expressed through cock-rock songs from the ’80s: Guns N’ Roses! Poison! David Lee Roth! Pat Benatar! Foreigner! Extreme! Warrant! Bon Jovi! Def Leppard!
Continue reading “Nothin’ but a Groupie Time” »
MOVIE REVIEW
This Means War (2012)
Kimberley French/20th Century Fox
If democracy ever comes to an end in the United States and future movie historians look back for the first indication that the fascists were taking over, “This Means War” will be a good place to start.
Tuck (Tom Hardy) and FDR (Chris Pine) are lifelong besties who work for the C.I.A. — despite Tuck being British — but never mind. When they aren’t throwing Eurotrash villains from the top of Hong Kong skyscrapers, they are cleaning knives at their underground Batcave office in Los Angeles, to the great annoyance of their boss (Angela Bassett, stunning as ever but criminally underused). FDR is so much of a player that his apartment is built underneath a swimming pool. Tuck had a wife and kid once, but they got divorced. So, as FDR’s kindly grandmother (Rosemary Harris, of course) tells him, “That doesn’t count.” As the thrills of seeing who has the bigger gun begin to pall, they decide to get back into the dating game.
Continue reading “The Spies Who Loved Mean” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Position Among the Stars (2011)
HBO
This Dutch-financed documentary about an Indonesian family in a favela in Jakarta spans approximately two years and is apparently the final film in a trilogy. Director Leonard Retel Helmrich seems to have chosen this family because it is a microcosm for many of the challenges of modern life in Indonesia. But the movie also brings up many more first-world questions.
Continue reading “A 3-Generation Ascend Up the Social Ladder” »