Even in recent times, Oscar must still contemplate a large, weighty tome of a film once in a while, a throwback to Lawrence of Arabia and The Godfather and Citizen Kane and similarly granular tales of epic ambition. Films like Power of the Dog and Tár leap to mind when it comes to Oscar conversation, and now we have The Brutalist.
Often deep character studies told over a number of years or decades, such films tend to attract initial admiration…
I came to this movie late.
At times endearing and at times deeply uncomfortable, this skewed and violent vision of New York City through French eyes with an ostensibly Italian protagonist who never actually feels Italian is often fascinating and either a complete mess or rich and complex, depending on your given mood when you watch it.
The film turns on three acting performances:
Reno is wonderful, understated and quietly wounded and halfway checked out at times (and now I…
Often I will champion an underdog. This film and its characters are a living, bleeding, yelping example of underdogs. It might turn out they should all have been drowned in a river along with a title that's either execrable or sheer genius.
Regardless, I need to put down some words here before my responses recede into memory.
This is far from being a great or even a good film in so many ways. But that isn't always the point. (Is…
Without smoke or mirrors, without melodrama or judgment, Leave No Trace is a quietly devastating and strangely hermetic exploration of human connection, of what it means to live like others, or not, in a wounded and wounding world.
Both central performances are exceptional. The forests of Oregon and Washington too. Those giant Douglas firs seem to stand like vast guardians over the father (Will, played by Ben Foster) and his teenage daughter (Tom, played by Thomasin McKenzie) as the pair…
