In the opening of 28 Weeks Later, Don (Robert Carlyle) faces a dilemma: He can leave his wife to die and run like hell on the off chance that he might outrun the “infected,” or he can stay with her and face a gruesome end. He runs like hell, and looks back to see his wife attacked. This is the movie writ small, laying the groundwork for more impossible choices.
In 1999, the person I’d just started dating commented in an e-mail that every time she read the Stephen King essay about baseball, she knew what it felt like to be one of those little leaguers, even though she (at the time) knew little of baseball and less of little league. I was struck immediately: It’s not how I felt in little league.
Stone Reader is a bibliophile’s wet dream, a love letter to reading as well as the texture and heft of the physical book. It’s also an open, expansive, cleverly made film that’s accessible to intelligent people everywhere. I don’t think I’ve read a single book among the dozens mentioned in Stone Reader, and I still loved it.
The Last Jedi is clearly an abysmal failure. Take it from Rob Cain, who on December 22 published an article on Forbes.com with the headline “Last Jedi Grosses Are Collapsing with the Worst Daily Holds of All Nine Star Wars Movies”. But Cain’s chosen lens has several flaws.
If Peter Weir’s movies fundamentally operate on basic levels and within simple formulas, they also resonate more deeply than those of virtually any other working director. Weir creates well-rounded and complicated characters, puts them in a premise, and watches them go. He is, in short, making character-driven movies, generally without pretense or intrusive style, which might be one reason he’s not held in terribly high esteem.
In Inside Man, director Spike Lee and screenwriter Russell Gerwitz announce early that nothing too traumatic will befall any of the characters, and then they keep that promise; they implicitly give the audience permission to enjoy the film.
It’s finally time to look at Charlie Kaufman as a serious screen artist. The scribe who gave us Being John Malkovich and Adaptation has always been imposingly intelligent, clever, and inventive in both his conceits and plots, but it was easy to question his heart. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind finally shows that he has more to offer than left-field premise and ambitious narrative structure.
With Monster, writer/director Patty Jenkins has fashioned a story of insistent, persistent desperation that is so fully embodied by Charlize Theron that I had a hard time believing the movie’s politics and psychology were so facile.
The disappointment of Christopher Nolan’s enormously entertaining – and slyly provocative – The Prestige comes in its closing minutes, when it adds a fourth act to its illusion: the final reveal. As any magician will tell you – as the movie itself reminds the audience – knowledge of the secret robs the trick of its power and allure.
Junebug has an affection for empty physical space, silence, and the way sound travels through a house at night. The result is a typically indie meet-the-parents family drama infused with eerie, unacknowledged loneliness. Plus: a dully competent Proof.
