Archive for category: Reviews

A tableau vivant in which ‘reality’ is a painting – specifically, Pieter Breugel’s “Road to Cavalry.” The movie obscures Jesus’s crucifixion amid 16th-century Flemish peasants and red-tunicked Spanish soldiers, just as Breugel did in his metaphor-filled canvas. With minimal soundtrack and even less dialogue, watching this film becomes an intense experience, and trying to piece together the action furthers one’s concentration. The movie could have done without identifiable stars Michael York and Charlotte Rampling, but perhaps director Lech Majewski felt they were needed to get this Polish feature into the few arthouses where it will be shown. We accept the more anonymous characters as real, although we are shown they are actors, they are filmed before a painted backdrop, and we see Breugel in the foreground, imagining them. What, then, is this saying about the story of Jesus?

A deft amalgam of rowdy humor and murderous criminality, this dramedy rode the broad back of Brendan Gleeson to a wistful conclusion that made you mourn the end of the story, and perhaps the character. Unfortunately, both were let down by Don Cheadle’s unbelievable American counterpart, more Stepin Fetchit than crime-stopper. What a lone FBI agent was doing in Ireland in the first place was as much a mystery as why director McDonagh would think such a foil was needed for Gleeson to run away with the show.

A rare old-fashioned well-made film, with good guys, bad guys, a plot, fine acting, a bit of history, local color and a satisfying ending. This is sure-fire Oscar bait, although with so many deserving actresses – in order, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Emma Stone and Jessica Chastain – it’s hard to know who will get the nominations and in which category. The only false note for me was Bryce Dallas Howard’s Hilly Holbrook, too extreme for belief. The blogosphere has objected to the movie’s one-sided picture of the South in 1963 – glossing over civil rights campaigners and the fact that nice woman mistreated their servants, too – but any film only has to tell its one story, and this story was a good one.

One wonders how good a movie this could have been with a real actor instead of Steve Carrell in the lead role, but since he was the movie’s executive producer that wasn’t going to happen. As a result, you had Julianne Moore going through a kaleidoscope of facial expressions, showing real hurt, confusion, and longing, while Carrell, playing opposite her, responded with his single doofus look. Even the kids made Carrell look plastic. As a result the movie, despite some funny lines, never came to mean anything, and there was no emotional payoff, except maybe for the teenage babysitter.

Even Impressionist paintings have a subject, but this collection of vignettes about the New York Times went all over the place. Was this film about how the Times now covers the media? about the Times’s uneasy relationship with new media? about the troubling economics of print journalism? how a story – e.g., the rise of WikiLeaks or the fall of the Chicago Tribune – gets reported? or a profile of David Carr, with a sidebar on Tim Arango? As previously discussed (see Buck, below), a documentarian is at the mercy of events, and if nothing dramatic happens during your year of filming, the result can come out a little flat. If there were big events at the Times last year, the filmmakers missed them. The central points – the world of information is changing, traditional newspapers are struggling to make ends meet, and we need the Times’s reporting – are so well-worn and obvious that they can’t carry a movie without more focus and drama. The only surprise for me in the whole film was seeing our old friend Katherine Bouton leaving her job of many years. The only fun insight: seeing what the names familiar from bylines – like David Carr, David Remnick, Nicolas Lemann and Tim Arango – look and sound like.