David Koskas/Lucky Red
MOVIE REVIEW
Grace of Monaco (2014)
Future scholars mapping the course of the celebrity biopic as the genre headed for the rocks will immerse themselves in “Diana,” “Rush,” “The Fifth Estate” and “Grace of Monaco,” and be forced to concede — before they pass out — that the one with Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly bucked the trend — just not in ways that made the slightest difference. Olivier Dahan’s film limits itself to a brief window of Kelly’s time as fairy-tale princess, sparing audiences from the dreaded template of rise and fall; and it puts its subject in a functioning historical context, rather than just fetishizing her inner pain. It even features a performance you can’t look away from, although that happens to be Tim Roth’s portrayal of Prince Rainier as a monarch chafing under the weight of history, who might at any moment stab Charles de Gaulle with a fish knife.
Continue reading “Dial M for Murmur” »
Jack English/Studiocanal
MOVIE REVIEW
The Two Faces of January (2014)
Enough of author Patricia Highsmith’s intuition for the dire fallibility of menfolk lingers in “The Two Faces of January” to give the film a certain residual bite, despite the tendency of writer and director Hossein Amini to desiccate most of the juice out of everything. No surprise that the scriptwriter of “Drive” is prone to flat and emphatic point-making — although Mr. Amini handles his script with kid gloves compared to Nicolas Winding Refn‘s self-annihilating injection of TNT — but at least this gives more unhindered screen time to Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac, cutting a dash across early-1960s Athens and Crete in nice linen suits while coming to detest each other.
Continue reading “Evil Under the Sun” »
Niko Tavernise/Columbia Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
Some superhero stories can shoulder excess baggage with ease, but by rights a Spider-Man film should drill down to their simplest essences: the transformed human body; the exhilaration of flight; urban strife; youthful revolt; hubris. “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” isn’t really into simple essences, obliged instead to do that modern thing of providing $200-million-worth of mild legal highs, via scripts in which all relevant bullet points are actioned. The only properly new element is an air of collective panic about Disney, judging by the fractured clip from the next “X-Men” film shoehorned into the end credits of this one to try and bolster a mutual defense. Would-be wild and crazy cinema with all strings attached, “ASM2” is an average superhero film in every way, and so has to shoulder its share of the blame for the fact that the average is now decaying with a pretty rapid half-life.
Continue reading “A Mangled Web” »
Erik Aavatsmark/Vertigo Média
MOVIE REVIEW
Pioneer (2014)
Norway’s natural environment was a big factor in “Insomnia,” Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 debut in which Stellan Skarsgård struggles with a murder case and the extended daylight hours, and comes off worst on both counts. It’s at the heart of “Pioneer,” too — the director’s new film set in the early 1980s — right at the moment when exploitation of the North Sea oil lying offshore is about to alter the country from top to bottom. Part paranoid conspiracy thriller and part blue-collar procedural, it maneuvers deep-sea diver Petter (Aksel Hennie) into position as the fly in the ointment for those awaiting Norway’s transformation into one of the world’s richest countries. They duly set about removing the irritant obstacle; a plot whose fidelity to real events hinted at in the credits is hard to judge, but whose broad authenticity for those caught up in the transformation at the time would seem tough to deny.
Continue reading “Pipe Dreams” »
Christian Geisnaes/Magnolia Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
Nymphomaniac (2014)
Upholding the tradition by which Lars von Trier spooks the massed ranks of the tabloids with talk of pornography before then unveiling films that prove as arousing as a kick in the knee, the four-hour, two-volume “Nymphomaniac” is merciless and hilarious in close proximity. The story skips between an intellectual investigation of a woman’s insatiable libido and a stylized erotic farce, threatening to cast its vote against optimism altogether and decide that no peace between the sexes is possible or perhaps advisable. Along the way, Volume I — with its droll laughs at regular intervals — becomes Volume II, which plunges into darkness headfirst. Large themes are invoked; large genitalia are inspected. Large theories are inevitable.
Continue reading “Danish Blue” »
MOVIE REVIEW
RoboCop (2014)
Columbia Pictures and MGM Pictures
There are several films wrapped up in "RoboCop," of which the new one starring Joel Kinnaman as the luckless Alex Murphy and Abbie Cornish as his traumatized wife is competent, slick and knows that some topicality will condense automatically in a movie with Samuel L. Jackson as a ranting conservative talk-show host. The immediate problem is the heavy fan-service nods made to another film, Paul Verhoeven's 1987 original, which tend to land with a clang. If the new model is going to invoke its predecessor as knowingly as that, it can't complain if some comparisons are made about the level of ambition. The Reaganite military-industrial complex with its heartless wonks was only one target of the original film, a curate's cornucopia that also scooped up the Vietnam mind-set, blue-collar nobility, the role of women, contempt for intelligence and religious symbolism. José Padilha's version puts all its chips on one number instead, correctly spotting that contracted-out drone warfare is a moral minefield, but down-shifting the end result from gallows pulp to a high-concept sci-fi actioneer about a dead-shot cyborg and the woman who loves him. American Jesus has been swapped out for American Gladiator.
Continue reading “To Protect and Preserve” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Saving Mr. Banks (2013)
François Duhamel/Walt Disney Studios
No one's hidden pain may be left undocumented these days, and most creative works end up being skinned so that the inner workings of their makers' tormented minds can be laid out on the operating table for inspection. This urge may throw some new light on the activities of characters in a story like "Mary Poppins," where the internalized pain and regrets of a young Australian girl can be seamlessly projected forward onto the book she wrote in later life, lending resonance to every poignant plot point. But it's a strange modern way to interact with art, which has historically been expected to present a mirror to your own personality, rather than provide a hotline to the one buzzing in the head of P. L. Travers. Plus a lot of immortal literature for young people was written by mature individuals with issues, and what does it matter? Look at Enid Blyton; the definitive film about her would have to be made by Wes Craven.
Continue reading “A Roomful of Sugar” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Fifth Estate (2013)
Frank Connor/Walt Disney Studios
Julian Assange's pre-emptive attempt to persuade Benedict Cumberbatch not to play the WikiLeaks founder in "The Fifth Estate" was probably a forlorn hope. As if Mr. Cumberbatch, now deep into that period when stars can be seen still visibly enjoying the work, was likely to refuse the opportunity of investigating a character as confounding and mannered as Mr. Assange. The actor's talent for mimicry has been put to good use before, but Bill Condon's film allows him to deploy it on a higher level altogether, and the results are a firework display. It's not his fault that the film comes not long after Alex Gibney's documentary "We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks," which covered some of the same ground in more eccentric and inventive fashion, and did so with a harder focus on Mr. Assange than "The Fifth Estate" can pull off.
Continue reading “Publish and Be Slammed” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Diana (2013)
Laurie Sparham/Le Pacte
History has more or less made its judgment on Britain's former Princess of Wales, but what it will make of the current state of the biopic industry is anybody's guess. The double whammy of "Diana" and "Rush" in close proximity suggests that the English-speaking end of the genre can be easily rendered speechless, finding nothing left to say and apparently no new ways left to say it. Excepting some wild-card swerves like casting Cate Blanchett as an avatar of Bob Dylan, mainstream depiction of people in the public eye seems to have lost most of its audacity, unable to gain traction when fame means already being lost into the pulping machine of celebrity and voyeurism and prurience. No coincidence surely that documentarians are currently running rings around feature film makers when it comes to biography, or that those feature films are reduced to the most literal self-explanatory approaches to the material. You don't have to have met Diana Spencer to spot that the character in "Diana" is a sketchy outline, you just have to have met another human being. A scriptwriter can type "Diana feels nameless existential dread in a Paris hotel corridor" with a straight face, but see that exact thing and the floor opens up beneath you.
Continue reading “Royal Pain” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Great Beauty (2013)
Gianni Fiorito/Pathé Distribution
When Peter Greenaway gazed at Rome back in 1987 for “The Belly of an Architect,” he pointed his near-stationary camera towards it from a distance, until the static accumulating from this God’s-eye view nearly caused the screen to bow outward at the sides. Paolo Sorrentino does things differently, and “The Great Beauty” hews close to the affluent end of the Eternal City’s citizenry and shares their perspectives instead. Mr. Sorrentino is interested in the effect that people have on their city rather than the reverse process, and his Rome is built on networks of vaguely mournful parties and nightclubs and middle-aged hedonists; a seemingly fragile base for so much history to find itself standing on. The resident Lord of Misrule Silvio Berlusconi never actually turns up, but lurks around every corner.
Continue reading “Tales of the City” »