"This distortion, this repulsion, this wicked witch."
Did not expect to like this as much as I did. Amazing lead performances, off the charts production design. There's a scene towards the end of the movie that stretches a 7-minute song into a 15-minute scene in the most exhilarating way any working director today could conceive it. At times, and despite a few apparent flaws in terms of storytelling and ensemble work, Wicked is right up there with some of the most riveting movies of the year.
Lee: "This place is like everything I'd forgotten."
Sammy: "Funny. I was thinking it felt like everything I remembered."
Alex Garland deserves some major credit for the way he keeps a strong focus on the importance of journalism and the understated risks related to the profession in a context of a crisis. In spite of the thousands of other ways this film could have gone, Garland faithfully follows the story through the eyes and lenses of two war photographers, providing…
"Believe me, you don't want Hannibal Lecter inside your head. Just do your job, but never forget what he is."
I saw The Silence of the Lambs a few years ago, but I wasn't really seeing, then, what was so monumentally great about it. As it turns out, the genius of the film isn't really found in what it shows us, but rather in what it doesn't—objects, faces, bodies—leaving up to the viewer the task of looking for anything that might…
Story reenactment via actors and an apparently fictionalized script—not the case here, as it is stated very early on that the reenacted conversations are "recreations of wiretap transcripts released by the US government"—in documentaries tends to turn me off, but there was something about it in this one that elevated the facts and events to a higher level. I don't know—perhaps it was the fact that the story was so clear-cut to begin with and needed a second perspective to…
