The Count of Monte Cristo is a very good adaption encased in a very pedestrian-ly made film. It takes real skill to distill a 1000 page novel into a 3 hour film without making a carapace of the original material, but the film miraculously succeeds in this way and feels plotty and buoyant pretty much throughput. This is absolutely the reason to see it - as well as generally very good casting, Pierre Niney as the titular count foremost.
I…
I came to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown with familiarity with only a handful of Bob Dylan songs and the barest contours of a biography. It seems then that the success of the film for a viewer like me is less about how well Timothee Chamalet inhabits this pop cultural titan that looms large in 20th/21st century consciousness - a question of accuracy and verisimilitude - but how well does the film function as a piece of entertainment itself.
For…
Eggers’ Nosferatu is scrupulously faithful to Murnau’s 1922's classic - to a fault. Visually, it distinguishes itself as beautifully configured: painterly, a study in watercolour, rather than the sepia inkiness of Murnau’s Expressionist vision. But in terms of ideas, Eggers’ film offers no real, new insight. In particular, ideas relating to sexual politics are murky at best - is it trying reconfigure Ellen’s story as a somewhat feminist reclaiming of female sexuality? Sometimes you feel like it wants to, but…
Anora is sort of a genre sleight-of-hand trick. It begins as a sort of caper into the sybaritic pleasures of the ultra-wealthy, with its Cinderella-esque meet cute between the vacuous scion of a mysterious Russian oligarch, Vanya, and the tough and wily Ani (Anora). It's not placid viewing in any way though - even as you’re enjoying yourself in this strange almost rom-com, you’re always expecting the penny to drop and the film to tread a familiar path towards darker…
