There is in Luc Besson’s ANNA fully one-third of a very good movie. That third is a finely drawn satire, cartoonishly violent in its sublimation of female rage as it addresses female exploitation in the modern world using the milieus of espionage and modeling as the metaphor. The other two-thirds is a plodding retread of… Read More »
THE PARTY
It begins with Kristen Scott-Thomas, in stark black-and-white, answering her door, hair askew, elegance frayed, eyes wild. She points a handgun right at the camera.
DUNKIRK
Spinoza once opined that you couldn’t use words to describe God, because by choosing any one or several, you would be eliminating the infinite nature of the deity. That essential inadequacy of words drives much of Christopher Nolan’s stunning film, DUNKIRK. Stunning in many sense of that word. Hence, we don’t learn that Tommy (Fionn… Read More »
ANTHROPOID
ANTHROPOID is divided into two episodes, one more gut-wrenching than the last as it tells the fact-based story of Czech partisans on what is essentially a suicide mission to assassinate SS General Reinhardt Heydrich, Butcher of Prague, co-planner of the Final Solution, and third in line in the Nazi hierarchy. While the first part is… Read More »
IN THE HEART OF THE SEA
No one knows why a whale of unusual coloration destroyed the whaling ship Essex in 1820. Certainly, nothing of the sort had been reported before, though whaling ships had been aggressively hunting the largest animal to ever live on earth ever since the discovery that whale oil could be used to light lamps and heat… Read More »
IN TIME
IN TIME is a better idea for a movie than it is a movie. The conceit is a clever one, and more, ahem, timely it could not be. In an alternate universe very much like our own, science has cracked the problem of ageing, and everyone is genetically programmed to stop the aging process at… Read More »
28 DAYS LATER
At one point in 28 DAYS LATER, a character makes the salient point that from a geological viewpoint, the reign of human beings on planet Earth is barely a blip on the radar of existence. Humans might, indeed, be thought of as an anomaly and their disappearance could be construed as a return to normalcy.… Read More »
RED EYE
Most horror films are dedicated to the proposition that females are prey and little else.
SUNSHINE
With SUNSHINE, Danny Boyle once again switches film genres with a masterly touch. Having explored gritty realism with TRAINSPOTTING, social satire with SHALLOW GRAVE, whimsical fantasy with MILLIONS, and apocalyptic horror with 28 DAYS LATER, he has moved on to science fiction, albeit science fiction that also functions as a white-knuckle thriller. For all the… Read More »