#film criticism

#film criticism

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.

Renate Reinsve, the radiant star of The Worst Person in the World, here plays Nora, an accomplished stage actor whose mother has recently died. As she grieves with her younger sister, Agnes, wonderfully played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Nora must deal with the return of their long-estranged father, Gustav, played by Stellan Skarsgard. Gustav, a film director of some note, abandoned the family when the girls were still young.

Anyone who thinks it's easy to make a romcom should take a look at this. It has all the ingredients: good-looking leads (Alex Pettyfer, Eva De Dominici), picturesque locations (the film is mainly set in Puglia, and benefits from funding from the region), lightly comic music underlining the scenes, charismatic veterans in supporting roles (with Toni Collette and Andy Garcia), transparently engineered third-act jeopardy, and so on and so forth.

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.

The Nuremberg trials have inspired filmmakers before, from Stanley Kramer's 1961 drama to the 2000 television miniseries with Alec Baldwin and Brian Cox. But for the latest take, "Nuremberg," writer-director James Vanderbilt focuses on a lesser-known figure: The U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who after the war was assigned to supervise and evaluate captured Nazi leaders to ensure they were fit for trial (and also keep them alive). But his is a name that had been largely forgotten: He wasn't even a character in the miniseries.

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.

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 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.

While I'm not about to declare painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel's career as jettisoned to artistic purgatorio, especially after the radiance and wonder of artist-driven portraits like "Basquiat" and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" and pieces of "At Eternity's Gate," his decade-in-the-kiln " In the Hand of Dante," which itself spans 70 decades from 14th-century Florence to almost-present-day Venice and New York, is epically miscalculated despite sequences and stretches of grandeur.

"You need to rewatch it to get it" can be either a promise or a threat. It's satisfying to let a movie pull one over on you, then study how all the pieces were put into place; there's a good reason was constantly credited with " revitalizing " the whodunnit. But when setting up the board gets in the way of character and story, all the rewatches and explainers in the world won't pump blood through a stone heart.

Hard on the heels of The Substance comes another film about a dodgy Los Angeles experimental clinic and showbiz obsession only this medical outfit, Somnium, is a shonky mind-fixing operation a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Wannabe actor Gemma (Chloe Levine) lands a sleep-sitting job at the firm, watching over patients in pods who are hoping to improve their lives by having helpful dreams injected into their subconsciouses.

Then, in the mid-twentieth century, a group of young French critics issued a cri du coeur that gave rise to the figure of the auteur: visionary filmmakers ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson. In the final installment of this year's Critics at Large interview series, Vinson Cunningham talks with the staff writer Richard Brody about the origins of auteur theory, and about the lengths to which directors have gone for artistic freedom in the decades since.

Amazon Prime's latest movie could so easily have been a modern take on H.G. Wells' all-time classic novel, employing found footage and gonzo documentary-style reporting to revive the spirit of Orson Welles' notorious 1938 radio production of the story.

Ari Aster confirmed he was approached to direct a Morbius project, questioning if it was Mobius or Morbius, indicating a humorous skepticism about the material.

In "Jurassic World: Rebirth," the overuse of product placement transforms the experience into a mere commercial venture, overshadowing the narrative and entertainment value.

It should be impossible to make a bad movie about scary dinosaurs. According to reviews for Jurassic World Rebirth, they have done just that for the fourth time in a row.

Roger's writing was a celebration of life itself, showing his love for both his birthday and the art of storytelling, reflecting joy and gratitude.