Archive for category: Reviews

This may be the best film about an artist I’ve ever seen, plus it’s a searing look at Nazi-era Germany and a charming love story. It also features six captivating (and attractive) actors who fill the screen and absorb our attention, none more than Tom Schilling, who radiates intelligence with his every look. Sebastian Koch, familiar from The Lives of Others, is almost as compelling in the more challenging role of the alpha villain. I didn’t watch this as a biography of Gerhard Richter, although of course I recognized Richter’s art in the paintings Barnert (Schilling) made and scenes he saw; so I am not judging the movie on that basis. It was simply a great movie on its own terms, with substance and style. When it ended I was sorry, and amazed that more than three hours had passed since its beginning.

*A note on the rating: I don’t believe I have given out a 9 since, maybe, Nashville, and it is time to adjust. I can save 9.5 and 10 for the perfect movie, if one ever comes. By bringing 9 into play I have more room to differentiate, without resorting to lots of fractions. I was finding that too many movies were falling between 7 and 8 to make my scale meaningful. Henceforth, 5 is a movie that leaves me cold but isn’t bad; 6 and 7 are movies that I’m glad I saw but have minor or major reservations about; 8 is a movie I can heartily recommend; and 9 is a landmark that holds up both while watching and afterward, a sure Top-Tenner for the year. The numbers below 5 reflect how much I disliked the experience.

Filmed in bleak-and-white, Cold War tells the oft-told tale of a man driven by lust who gives us his career, his country, and ultimately his life enslaved by his infatuation. She does little to merit his devotion and much to mock it, leaving me to impatiently and vainly implore him to get over it. The setting in Warsaw, Berlin and Paris, 1949-1964, lead us to hope for a geopolitical dimension that will justify the double entendre of the title, but all we get is changing music and hairstyles over the decades. Rather than sympathy or emotional entrapment, I felt dislike for the female lead, which made this a not very satisfying love story.

A tremendously powerful film about a 12-year-old street urchin in Lebanon who alternately games the system and is thwarted by it. The depiction of Arab street life might be hard to take for the unfamiliar viewer, but resonated with my North African Peace Corps memories. The plight of the refugee woman and son, not to mention Zain’s family life, seemed dramatically hopeless, but director Nadine Labaki tacked on a happy ending out of the blue that made the viewing experience enriching, not devastating. (Incidentally, this was a nice companion piece to fellow Oscar nominee, Shoplifters.)

Watching this, I was two-thirds ashamed to be an American, with our recent history running from Richard Nixon through the phony justifications of the Iraq invasion, but one-third proud to live in a culture that could produce such a clever, popular takedown of a living public figure. Some caricatures misfired – especially Steve Carrell’s Donald Rumsfeld – but I appreciated the effort to match actor with historical figure, like Eddie Marsan for Paul Wolfowitz. Most of the plot was familiar, but the light it concentrated on certain facts, such as Cheney’s sweetheart deals with Halliburton and the lack of a background check when he selected himself for the vice-presidency, still made me cringe. Christian Bale was amazing, but I doubt his Oscar chances: some voters must be Republicans; some will say it was impersonation, not acting; and others will just be so repulsed that they won’t want to see Cheney/Bale get any awards. I can see why this movie is not for everyone: it is tendentious, flip – one reviewer called in “meanspirited” – and treats very serious matters like a Doonesbury cartoon; but director Adam McKay’s storytelling style was original and consistent, and I laughed when I wasn’t cringing.

The opening ten minutes was a bracingly, convincingly staged school shooting and aftermath that gave me hope for an original, relevant film. The pre-Natalie Portman Celeste character then sings her original song in response to the terror, it goes You-Tube viral and the film collapses into cliche and the movie version of life. Her song is about one-quarter as good as the equivalent moment in A Star Is Born. Worse, however, is Natalie Portman, who takes over the character 15(?) years later. She not only sings songs as bad as the later music in A Star, but she is the most unattractive figure I can remember seeing in a movie: her looks, her hairstyles, her mannerisms, her actions, her interpersonal relations, her public persona are all painful to sit through. Willem Dafoe, fresh off At Eternity’s Gate, narrates.