#film-criticism

#film-criticism

Russell had already cemented his audacious sensibilities with Tommy and The Devils, but this sci-fi horror, released 45 years ago today, pushes the limits of sensory overload. Renowned screenwriter and novelist Paddy Chayefsky (best known for Network and The Hospital) wrote a powerhouse script based on his surreal 1978 novel, itself inspired by neuroscientist John Cunningham Lilly's research on sensory deprivation tanks and psychedelics.

A biopic that skips along the surface of its subject, deriving cliched psychological insight from its traumatized source, The Chronology Of Water sees Kristen Stewart liquify Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir into a expressionistic slurry. In her feature debut as writer-director, Stewart takes explicit pains to explicitly render Yuknavitch's pain on screen, drenching the swimmer-turned-writer's life-spanning childhood abuse, young-adult hedonism, and professional success-in over-styled and overindulgent imagery.

Tarantino listed his 20 favorite movies on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, and when discussing his no. 5 pick, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, he had a shocking view of Paul Dano's performance as twins Paul & Eli Sunday. " There Will Be Blood would stand a good chance at being no. 1 or 2 if it didn't have a big, giant flaw in it ... and the flaw is Paul Dano," Tarantino shared as he compared Dano's performance to Daniel Day-Lewis.

Eternity doesn't rank among them, though director David Freyne and his co-writer Pat Cunnane deserve some credit for setting their sights so high. They have built an entire vision of the afterlife to serve as the setting for their otherwise modest romantic comedy. Okay, some credit ... and maybe also some blame. The beyond that they've conjured up is so ridiculously specific that we can't help but start poking holes in it.

Oliver Laxe leads his audience into a wilderness of non-meaning in this strange and unrewardingly oppressive film that was the joint jury prize winner at Cannes this year and the recipient of all sorts of critical superlatives. For me, Sirat is the most overpraised movie of the year exasperating and bizarre in ways that become less and less interesting and more and more ridiculous as the film wears on.

[ Big sigh.] Well, reactions have been divided already. This may speak more to my reaction than anyone else's but I think the feeling will be Didn't we just do this a year ago? And with this movie opening now, right as the annual scourge that we call awards season is getting under way, I'm sure people will be talking about performances.

Between the ages of 3 and 5, I fell in love with the movies after seeing my very first one, learned how to read and write, and discovered there was actually a job out there that combined all of those things into one: A film critic. From that point on, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. And while my peers may have yearned to be doctors or firemen or the like, I wanted to watch movies and write about them,

In the Now You See Me movies, the so-called explanations for the big tricks are even more ridiculous than the tricks themselves; they're not built on the characters' skill or determination or cleverness, but on narrative convenience and screenwriter contrivance. These films are anti-magic: They quash the wonder of both a perfectly executed trick and its oh wow reveal. (This also makes them bad heist movies, by the way.)

Scored to the upbeat romantic sounds of Mickey & Sylvia's "Love is Strange, a brief collage from a ghostly POV hops and skips through time, as various women across the decades and centuries become enamored with some ghostly, unseen figure, but each romance soon curdles. Awkward silences abound, speaking volumes even in musical montage. These things happen, after all. Boy meets girl. They fall in love. They drift apart. It ends in bloodshed.

The first is that they all should have spawned gratuitously sleazed out direct-to-video sequels that recast Amy Adams in the lead role and aired on Cinemax every other night for the entirety of my high school years (shout out to Roger Kumble, the James Mangold of Adrian Lynes). The second - and perhaps more broadly relevant - aspect that binds those movies together is that Hollywood is currently in the process of remaking each and every one of them.

There was her 1999 debut, "Ratcatcher," about an impoverished Glasgow boy suffering tragedies and drawn almost telepathically to an eerie canal. Then, "Morvern Callar," in which Samantha Morton assumes the authorship of her dead boyfriend's manuscript, a man she has dismembered and buried in the Scottish mountains. "We Need to Talk About Kevin" became one of 2011's most controversial films, dousing us in the mental wreckage of a woman (Tilda Swinton) after her son shoots up his school with a bow and arrow.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

The built-in paradox of the artist biopic is that, with rare exceptions, any film that tries to represent the life and creative process of a great artist will necessarily result in a less brilliant work than its subject would themself have produced. , for one, is a fine example of the musical biopic, with a galvanic lead performance from Jamie Foxx, but can it hold up to Ray Charles' 1960 recording of " Georgia on My Mind"? Last year's A Complete Unknown featured a superb Timothée Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan, but no one would call James Mangold's well-observed portrait of a folk musician on the verge of a creative breakthrough the cinematic equivalent of a Dylan ballad like " A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."

The Smashing Machine, which Safdie both wrote and directed, portrays Mark (the character, as distinguished from the real-life Kerr) from the time of his first bout in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, in 1997, to 2000. The period begins with victories and growing fame-though his achievements are shadowed and threatened by substance-abuse issues and conflict with his girlfriend, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt)-and peters out with his climactic defeat in a big-money tournament that owes its high financial stakes to his earlier success.

The otherworldly beauty and consuming, tattoo-strewn look of Angelina Jolie hasn't always allowed for a great deal of versatility as an actor, a difficult face to seamlessly slot into most stories. The star hasn't seemed to be all that interested in acting for a while anyway (since 2012, she has physically appeared on screen just seven times) and has preferred to spend time behind the camera and focusing on both her family and her philanthropic pursuits.

If nothing else, "Franz" gets the handwriting right. Sure, praising someone's calligraphy is the quintessential backhanded compliment, but when it comes to Kafka, the penmanship is important. The Czech literary titan was famous for preferring to write longhand, even after the explosion of the typewriter. His manuscripts are displayed in museums across the world, having attained an almost mythical status. Agnieszka Holland's feverish new biopic on Kafka often finds itself pouring over his desk or sneaking glimpses of his love letters.