Is it cheating to say a movie told in two chapters with an intermission at the centre is a tale of two halves?
It is clear that the opening chapter is much easier to wrap your arms around. While lots of the style and direction from Corbet is new and interesting, it is a story about an immigrant coming to America and their struggle to achieve success. There is a propulsive momentum to this half as we follow every success…
The movie can be broken down into before car chase and after car chase. BCC had enough intrigue and a decent set up with just the right amount of untrustworthiness that you can get locked in pretty quickly. However, ACC is a flat, nothing special, nothing captivating series of scenes that ultimately culminate in an unsatisfactory ending. Being shot on iphone both makes the movie look grounded and gritty at the best of times, but amateurish and cheap at the worst of them.
More proof that Robert Pattinson is one of the best working right now, and that more Pattinson is never a bad thing. He's the best part of the movie, accent and all, and taps into sympathetic idiot role perfectly.
Unfortunately the rest of the movie was not always as strong or consistent as Pattinson. This is something that I (and many others) have noticed in Bong Joon-ho's English language work, but there's an over-the-top quality to some of the performances…
Does a good job of setting up why the eventual outcome was really the only outcome that was ever going to happen. It's honestly dizzying how many issues there were with the festival before they even let people into the venue, let alone after people started getting dehydrated, sexually assaulted, and a million other things that exacerbated the event. It was a powder keg, and they were so ill prepared for what they were about to unleash, and lots of…
Martin McDonagh understands one key element of the black comedy which I think most don't, and that is you have to push the darkness as far as it can possibly go, and even then give it one extra nudge. His comedy is almost more of a release of tension than it is actual jokes, and this is where Banshees sings.
The two lead performances are pitch perfect, Farrell perhaps being the standout because it's another "against type" role (does he…
