The legendary jazz pianist gets the biopic treatment, albeit with far less crowd-pleasing flash and far more character-based introspection, very much in keeping with the playing style of the subject and the musical idiom in which he flourished.
Stew Mott
44 posts
...complex comedy-drama about a film-maker struggling with problems both professional and personal, and all the while another film-maker is figuring out how to tell her story in a way that reflects his own equally difficult life.
Willem Dafoe is in quiet and self-effacing mode in this bittersweet comedy drama based on the Arthur Schnitzler novella about Ed, a long-retired poet rediscovered by a clique of young New York hipsters determined to lionise him until he re-enters their bohemian world by way of writing a memoir.
Claire Foy processes her grief over the death of her father through an obsessive commitment to a Eurasian goshawk in this middlebrow but emotionally affecting riff on Ken Loach’s Kes, which dramatises the popular 2014 memoir of nature writer Helen Macdonald.
...metatextual slasher movie about a young film-maker working on a reboot of a 1980s classic, while developing a penetrating relationship with the reclusive star of the original.
...everyone’s favourite friendly neighbourhood superhero has to contend not only with colourful new villains (and a couple of colourful old allies) but also with body-wide mutagenic changes that are turning him into a brand new kind of Spider-Man.
The stakes are raised to even more diabolical levels in this sequel to the gleefully violent and acutely socially aware 2019 horror hit, in which Samara Weaving’s plucky bride evaded the murderous attentions of her new in-laws. This time, she teams up with her sister (Kathryn Newton) against a whole illuminatum of super-rich families seeking to consolidate their power by any means necessary.
Deadites roam the screen in search of a vicious game of psychological torture and an easy buck (as far as the proprietors of this venerable intellectual property are concerned), when a bereaved and dysfunctional family finds itself stuck in a house in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do but go insane and try and kill each other as disgustingly and spectacularly as they can.
The uncluttered plot has a stronger throughline than in many such superhero epics, demonstrating commendable reluctance to pin the fate of the entire universe on her admittedly invulnerable shoulders.
..this time their epic, sprawling mode of storytelling details a real life – that of Ann Lee, eighteenth-century founder of the Shakers religious sect, whose dramatisation here borders on fundamentalist propaganda.
...operates on a smaller scale than previously, dealing with stand-up comedians as opposed to rock stars (A Star Is Born) or master conductors (Maestro). Thus it feels like a return to the roots, an origin story for an ordinary but talented Joe who gets his break. He’s more interested in the neurotically funny camaraderie of a street-level scene, rather than the curse of individual high-functioning genius.
To their credit, the film-makers at least try to build a more interesting arc for its central character than the simplistic 1980s cartoon ever bothered with; then it blows up his colourful world into three dimensions, telling his tale in a mostly playful register cribbed most obviously from Thor: Ragnarok.
From the very first shot, the director / cinematographer wreaks destruction upon the sanctity of the family unit, even affronting his own characteristic practice of telling his stories through a series of almost still images held slightly too long to be comfortable for the viewer. Pálmason trusts our natural curiosity and filmgoing experience to help us look for the telling detail in his squared-off frames.
...feels less like a moralising history lesson and more like a pained cry of remorse, whose cinematic language has the steely nerve to ask the hard questions and refuse to answer them for you.
...a crowd-pleasing and at times genuinely wondrous mixture of scientific curiosity and human warmth, speaking a common language of optimism in the hope of rising above the din of a real world desperate to destroy itself.
The Gothic romance of James Whale’s 1935 horror classic The Bride Of Frankenstein is drastically relocated to Prohibition-era Chicago and New York, although that element of camp which made the original such a beloved cult item remains intact, and the new setting offers a sly metatextual nod to the era in which it was made.
...as stylish and well executed as the crimes it depicts, while revealing the weaknesses in the chains binding its litany of incident together. But believable characters and a sly sense of humour lubricate its procedural plot, easing us around its numerous chicanes without diluting their thrill factor.
Park Chan-wook cooks up another idiosyncratic blend of thrills and satirical dark comedy with this sublimely ridiculous tale of a newly redundant paper manufacturer so intent on getting his next job that he’s prepared to terminate the other applicants… with extreme prejudice.