Archive for category: Reviews

Directorially brilliant, Todd Haynes’s portrait of the seminal punk rock group packs the wallop of the Velvets’ best music. He mixes archival footage from the era with wonderful modern interviews, all the while explaining how their songs came to be and, best of all, how they sounded. Like many, I knew three or four of their songs and was vaguely aware of their Warhol connection; so this was an education about a time and place–a scene–similar to the world of Patti Smith’s Just Kids. The movie pounded just as hard, fast and wild as a show at Max’s Kansas City.

A thriller recounting the exploits of…a Swiss private banker, who is eager, if not desperate, not to lose his accounts. The most interesting character is his predecessor, who is mentioned by everyone but does not appear in the film. Cigarette smoking is the closest things come to action. As a portrait of the Buenos Aires aristocracy in 1980, under the military takeover, this film is probably spot-on, but we wonder why we are there.

I realize that smoking was more common in 1941, but why did Guillermo del Toro put cigarettes in almost every scene of this movie? It’s unneeded as an acting crutch, and it diverts the viewer’s (or at least my) focus from the story: what must his breath smell like when he kisses her?, I wonder extraneously. My bigger peeve is that it glorifies cigarettes to young people who are tempted to take up the unhealthy, filthy habit. If Bradley Cooper does it and looks cool, why shouldn’t I do it, too? This, of course, is not the only movie featuring cigarettes. My guess is that 75% of the ones I see do, and it’s almost always unnecessary to the plot. Why, then?
As for the movie itself, one wonders why it was needed, or wanted. Del Toro is known for his personal fascination with horror chambers, and the carnival setting allows him to wallow in the grotesque, while the story is textbook noir. Cooper’s character is not really convincing, but you feel Del Toro is more enamored of his scenes and settings than his people, none of whom we actually care about. Which is a problem.

The first-person story of a young refugee fleeing Afghanistan in 1984 is a sure-fire heart-tugger, but at the moment it mainly reminded me of man’s inhumanity to man and our failings as a species. The comic-novel format was curious at best, less and less satisfying as the film went on. And it did go on and on, yet leaving a gaping hole: how did our hero get from there to here, from poverty to Princeton?

Powerful and sleek, this compressed Macbeth begins in intensity and never lets up. Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are good, not great, as the title couple (and closed captioning was an aid in following the dialogue). The black-and-white cinematography, modernist architecture and insistent score create an atmosphere of constant foreboding. Kathryn Hunter’s “Sisters” helps, too. The fault, if there be one, was in the play: we never understood why Macbeth turned on the king–a rather crucial point.