Archive for category: Reviews

Both these movies, which we saw back-to-back one afternoon, are primarily about a relationship: a callow and sneakily beautiful young woman falls in love with an older, more experienced and perhaps inappropriate man. Except one relationship is toxic, while the other is sweet. Needless to say, the latter movie, Photograph, is the enjoyable one.

The Souvenir moved with the pace and misdirection of Last Year at Marienbad. Maybe there weren’t dream sequences or movies-within-the-movie, but I never knew for sure what was going on. All I knew for sure was that the male love interest, “Anthony,” was thoroughly despicable, on the surface and below. Yes, we know love may be blind, but we still won’t enjoy its making a fool of someone, in this case the wonderful Honor Swinton Byrne. Hearing he had died of an overdose was the only happy moment of the two-hour slog.

By contrast – restoring our faith in movie-going – Photograph was easy to follow, with a plot you’ve seen many times before. The film admits as much when, in the last scene, the lovers walk out in the middle of a movie and the man says he knows how the story ends, even though he hasn’t seen that particular film before. We are left to wonder whether this story, against all odds, will have that predictable happy ending, but ultimately we don’t care. We like the characters so much – they are both so thoughtful, with just the right amount of spunk and a palpable connection – that if this flirtation turns out to be just one bright, shining moment in otherwise humdrum lives we are grateful to have shared it with them. Even India, for the moment, doesn’t seem quite so grim.

Charlize Theron is a 10, Seth Rogen a 6, the funny-smart dialogue an 8, hence the final average. The movie manipulates in all the time-worn rom-com ways, which meant my cheeks were wet for the final 15 minutes. This was pure escapist entertainment, with topical jabs at Trump, Murdoch, Fox News and politics in general, to compensate for the gross-out element that comes with Rogen. (As the New Yorker put it, “a film for adolescents of all ages.”) I’m not sure that making Theron’s love interest be so clueless, untalented and unattractive was necessary for the film to work, but it was a small price to pay for the privilege of watching her for two hours.

Wonderful acting – by the horses. The opening scene of wild mustangs being herded by helicopter over a Nevada plain is the movie’s high point. The main story – horse tamed by man, while man is tamed by horse – is predictable to the point of cliche, although it may not have seemed so to the Belgian/French filmmakers. The two subplots – drug dealing among the convicts and the family relations of the hero – are too confusing to gain traction. Matthias Schoenaerts is the same bullheaded tough he played in Rust and Bone and Bullhead, but is less convincing when he moves out of character.

Welcome to Jordan Peele’s gun-free America, where peopled are murdered by shears, baseball bats, putters, fireplace pokers and rock crystals, as far as we could see. Nothing in the movie made sense, up to and including the final plot twists, but I suspect that is not required of a horror flick, so long as it keeps you on the edge of your seat – which Us did, unless like my viewing partner you quickly dismissed the whole thing –  which is why I give it a positive score. I also suspect that the buzz it is getting is due to the cast’s being African-American and Peele’s previous film, Get Out, having long legs.

A teaser of a mystery thriller, in which each plot point you anticipate turns in another direction. Franz Rogowski, for starters, didn’t seem like the leading man, until he was. And all the pieces you expected to fall into place at the end, fell apart. German storm troopers invading Paris made you think this was 1940, but the clothes and cars were modern. Nothing was as it seemed, which became a metaphor for Rogowski’s character. How we would behave under stress, political and personal, is a subject of Christian Petzold’s other remarkable films, Barbara and Phoenix, and he draws you in by making his people and their world so real, even when it isn’t. (Special shout-out to Paula Beer, who is the enchanting love interest in both Transit and Never Look Away.)