
Gilles Bruno Mingasson
MOVIE REVIEW
Last Days in the Desert (2015)
The weathered figure emerging from the wilderness after five weeks of contemplation and fasting in “Last Days in the Desert” is referred to either as Yeshua or by the all-purpose epithet of Holy Man; but there’s no ambiguity in Rodrigo Garcia’s film about who he actually is. And he’s also clearly Ewan McGregor, an actor whose skills at underplaying inner conflicts don’t get much of a run out these days but which potentially suit the son of God and his inklings of an appointment at Calvary pretty well. If you happen to think that a hyperbolic screen Jesus is the wrong approach, then Mr. Garcia’s sober and sedate film may be right up your aisle.
Continue reading “Holy Family Business” »

Agatha A. Nitecka
MOVIE REVIEW
45 Years (2015)
After “Weekend” cast a nonjudgmental eye over the couplings of people savoring their early decades on Earth, “45 Years” looks with equal tolerance at a married couple hovering around their seventh — in the process confirming Andrew Haigh as one of current British cinema’s rarely-spotted authentic humanists. With the domestic industry’s choices too often amounting to use of the heritage card, indulgence in histrionic aggro or a swing the other way into micromanaged oxygen starvation, Mr. Haigh once again proves to be one of those searching for a fourth way.
Continue reading “That’s Amour” »

Graeme Hunter
MOVIE REVIEW
The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015)
Robert Carlyle gets a bad case of the accidental serial-killer blues in “The Legend of Barney Thomson,” playing a sad-sack Glasgow barber with an unfortunate tendency to stab people with the styling shears. Poorly suited to employment burnishing other mens’ self-image and tied to the apron strings of a potty-mouth mother whose manner could alarm the horses, Barney’s impotent frustration with life’s unfairness leads him into a new sideline as what looks like Scotland’s least ingenious murderer. Unfortunately for him, another — rather more skillful — one of those is on the prowl already, sending victims’ severed body parts through the post and confounding a police force of Keystone-level uselessness.
Continue reading “Bad Hair Day” »

Concorde Filmverleih
MOVIE REVIEW
The Face of an Angel (2015)
With daunting synchronicity, Michael Winterbottom‘s sideways meditation on the Meredith Kercher murder trial arrives just as Italian justice passes another milestone on its lengthy process of failing to get to the bottom of the case. Mr. Winterbottom and writer Paul Viragh aren’t heading in that direction either, since “The Face of an Angel” has more abstract fish to fry than who precisely stabbed whom. Its business is the male heart and ego; specifically the ones inside Thomas (Daniel Brühl), whose efforts to navigate the fallout from a very similar legal case are derailed by neuroses, heartbreak, an inability to keep his pants on and a prodigious intake of gak. He is, needless to say, in the movie business.
Continue reading “The Italian Mob” »

Universal Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
Trash (2015)
Depictions of child poverty in well-meaning screen entertainments are bound to end up fudging the heart of the matter, since catching even five percent of the true grinding horror would bring an audience to its knees. “Trash” can’t really do anything about that, substituting instead a YA tone of earnest adolescent adventuring in a landscape of adult corruption and violence — ultimately the easier option.
Although Andy Mulligan’s source novel described a slum of imprecise location, Stephen Daldry‘s film plants its flag in Rio de Janeiro, giving the greedy politicians and murderous cops an imminent Olympic bonanza as extra rationale for lining their own pockets and ignoring the kids rummaging through their garbage mountains. Three of those — Raphael (Rickson Tevez), Gardo (Eduardo Luis) and Rato (Gabriel Weinstein) — find evidence of high-level corruption in a discarded wallet somewhere in there, and the chase is on.
Continue reading “Modern Life Is Rubbish” »

Film Movement
MOVIE REVIEW
Stations of the Cross (2014)
Dietrich Brüggemann’s deftly moving film about the dire consequences of religious devotion teeters between black satire and blacker comedy, but settles in the end on simple tragedy. “Stations of the Cross” adapts the stages of the Via Dolorosa into 14 extended scenes of staged formal rigor, an ongoing domestic calamity regarded almost entirely from a stationary camera at roughly eye level.
Continue reading “Suffer Little Children” »

Mongrel Media
MOVIE REVIEW
Winter Sleep (2014)
“Winter Sleep” crosses the tape at 196 minutes; long enough to watch all of “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” and then revisit the first quarter of it all over again. Whether Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s recent running times are an indulgence, a tactic or a mistake — he himself says that he pays the matter no mind at all — it again allows him to divide a film into formidably gorgeous tectonic plates of narrative, grinding against each other at geological pace while the men and women traveling on them completely fail to understand each other.
Continue reading “Giant Steppes” »

Anna Matveeva/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
Leviathan (2014)
“Leviathan” suggests an entire nation marooned in state of despair. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s new inquiry into the wrong turns taken by modern Russia reaches much the same conclusions as his previous ones, but tells a more explicitly political tale in the process — which makes the fate of the little people caught in the wash seem even more pitiable and inescapable than ever.
Continue reading “Northern Exposure” »

Larry D. Horricks/Studiocanal
MOVIE REVIEW
Serena (2014)
Susanne Bier‘s odd, mournful, memorable “Serena” looks like a western, sounds like a costume drama and behaves like a Greek tragedy; a potent combination to which the word uncommercial might also apply. Its central couple — would-be timber magnate George (Bradley Cooper) and new bride Serena (Jennifer Lawrence) — are involved in reshaping 1930s North Carolina and fending off a growing conservation movement, while doom rolls unstoppably toward them like a storm front. Not for nothing is “Serena” scripted by Christopher Kyle, author of two films for Kathryn Bigelow and one for Oliver Stone: large passions brew, big gestures abound — most items in both columns involving Ms. Lawrence.
Continue reading “Sable Clouds Playbook” »

Anne Joyce/Lionsgate
MOVIE REVIEW
The Rewrite (2014)
Hugh Grant and Marc Lawrence — now as telepathically linked as Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese — continue their long-term project of knocking the actor down a peg or two in “The Rewrite.” Way back in “Two Weeks Notice” he was a billionaire, but their latest comedy finds Mr. Grant busted all the way back to Hollywood scriptwriter. And it’s tough to get lower than that. Marooned in the sticks by an uncaring Tinseltown, this cynical grinch sees the appeal of honest toil and the affections of a feisty local lady — a plot that once kept Michael J. Fox in business and today feels like being beaten to death with a marshmallow.
Continue reading “Adventures in the Screen Tirade” »