There is a persistent torpor to REMINISCENCE, a film that tries to be many things and fails for the most part. Rife with visuals that evoke a disquieting dreamlike state, the story, an ersatz neo-noir set mostly between sunset and sunrise, drones along with the cinematic equivalent of a mosquito’s interminable buzz on a humid… Read More »
Search Results for: a quiet passion
JOHN AND THE HOLE
JOHN AND THE HOLE is a film that demands that its audience draw its own conclusions rather than spell out what has driven a 13-year-old boy to trap his family in an abandoned bunker. Dancing adroitly between reality and metaphor, this psychologically disturbing story is told in muted colors and hushed tones, the better to… Read More »
RIDERS OF JUSTICE
It’s impossible to pigeon-hole RIDERS OF JUSTICE. Part tragedy, part very black comedy, part action/revenge, it is nevertheless also a perceptive examination of troubled souls longing for surcease of sorrow for whom the usual therapeutic methods have failed. If that were all, it would be enough, but it goes further, essaying nothing less than a… Read More »
THE LITTLE THINGS
THE LITTLE THINGS, or to be precise, “the little things” is a well-thought-out film, and if putting a film together with the pre-fab precision of a Lego® sculpture were all it took to make a great flick, such it would be. Alas, the overweening self-conscious sense of profundity fails to convince even the most willing… Read More »
THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD
Armando Iannucci, a man possessing a preternatural gift for telling serious stories with a puckish twist, has taken on the classic Dickens tale of David Copperfield, and infused it with sparkling new life while remaining true to the original’s spirit. After all, despite his sometimes cloying sentimentality, Dickens spared his readers nothing when describing the… Read More »
TESLA
Quiet in tone, and visually arresting, TESLA tells the story of a man whose perspective had only the most tangential relationship to that of the mere mortals who surrounded him. Michael Almereyda film echoes that with a high-minded tone-poem that mixes fact and fiction to achieve an emotional and intellectual, if not factual, truth. The… Read More »
LAST CALL
LAST CALL uses what at first seems like a gimmick, two people on a split screen filmed at separate locations in one take in real time, to tell a quietly wrenching precis on loneliness and the need to connect in the 21st-century where access is immediate via phone or internet, but real connection is rare.… Read More »
MIDSOMMAR
At the end of MIDSOMMAR, our much put-upon heroine, Dani (Florence Pugh) smiles. It’s her first real smile of the film, and how she got there is a tale of bucolic splendor, ecological harmony, and psychic terror. Brought to us by Ari Aster, the iconoclastic mind behind HEREDITY, it finds in parable and metaphor the… Read More »
US
There is much to unpack in Jordan Peele’s deeply disturbing, darkly funny horror film, US. As it twists and turns through its doppelganger premise, the scariest part of the action isn’t the fear of home invasion by strangers out for slow, painstaking revenge.
SHOPLIFTERS (MANBIKI KAZOKU)
Palme d’Or winner SHOPLIFTERS is a radical deconstruction of family values in a world of dubious ethics. Set amid the throwaways of society, in this case Japan, it finds warmth and togetherness where we would least expect it, and from a family that is not so much scamming the system as they are a family… Read More »
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