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” »
DreamWorks Animation
MOVIE REVIEW
How To Train Your Dragon 2 (2014)
“How to Train Your Dragon 2” drifts even further away from Cressida Cowell’s book series: Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) and friends have grown up, while Vikings and dragons coexist peacefully in Berk. Valka (Cate Blanchett) — long presumed dead after giving birth to Hiccup — turns out to be some reclusive conservationist jungle woman. Meanwhile, renegade Drago Bludvist (Djimon Hounsou) has been assembling a dragon army to wage war on Berk.
Continue reading “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” »
James Bridges/20th Century Fox
MOVIE REVIEW
The Fault in Our Stars (2014)
At first glance, “The Fault in Our Stars” promises to give a tried-and-true daytime soap trope — star-crossed romance afflicted with terminal illness — the Y.A. novel treatment. One can almost picture a weepie making an auditorium full of Directioners tear up as if on cue. It’s difficult to fault someone uninitiated for making that assumption; yet at the same time, that would be underestimating the film.
Continue reading “Die Another Day” »
Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Beyond the Edge (2014)
In a world full of C.G.I. helicarriers, men walking away from explosions without batting an eyelash and women fighting crime with only their leather trousers holding their dignity together, an old-fashioned story of incredible human achievement is a radical invention. Since the tragic avalanche on Mount Everest a few months ago that took the lives of 12 Sherpas, “Beyond the Edge” is even more so its own kind of superhero movie.
Continue reading “A Mountain to Climb” »
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” »
Yaron Scharf/2014 Tribeca Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Zero Motivation (2014)
Tribeca Film Festival winner for Best Narrative Feature and Nora Ephron Prize, Talya Lavie’s “Zero Motivation” is an absurdist comedy that readily plays with fire. Revolving around a hapless female troop stationed on a desert artillery base in the south of Israel, the film wastes no time in targeting the Holy Grail among taboos: making light of the Holocaust.
Continue reading “Military Fatigue” »
Maria Malin/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
Third Person (2014)
Paul Haggis has again formulated an interwoven story with “Third Person,” this time finally resolving the contrivance inherent in the narrative device by having all interconnected vignettes conveniently taking place in one writer’s fertile imagination.
Continue reading “In the Valley of Blah” »
Guy Ferrandis/Mars Distribution
MOVIE REVIEW
Venus in Fur (2014)
Roman Polanski revisits his fascination with the psychosexual realm in a big-screen adaptation of David Ives’s Off-Broadway two-character piece “Venus in Fur,” which itself is a meta-reimagining (think Charlie Kaufman) of Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella “Venus in Furs” that famously spawned the term masochism.
Continue reading “Wanted and Desired” »
CIM Productions
MOVIE REVIEW
Dior and I (2014)
Frédéric Tcheng’s documentary “Dior and I” juxtaposes the compressed first eight weeks of Belgian designer Raf Simons’s reign as incoming creative director at the fashion house of Dior — from the announcement of his appointment to the runway of his first haute couture collection — with founder Christian Dior’s preparation for his own 1947 “New Look” collection (as recounted in passages from his 1956 memoir, “Christian Dior and I”).
Continue reading “Christian Values” »
Jeong Park/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
Love Is Strange (2014)
In Ira Sachs’s “Love Is Strange,” newlywed longtime companions Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) must separate when their matrimony causes the latter to lose his breadwinning job as a music teacher at a Catholic school.
Ben quickly wears off his welcome at the household of his nephew (Darren Burrows), stay-at-home writer wife (Marisa Tomei) and young son (Charlie Tahan). Meanwhile, George barely puts up with frequent parties thrown by his hosts/former neighbors (Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez) that prevent him from crashing on their couch.
Continue reading “Married Life” »