If not for the ineffably modern hollowness of Charlie Hunnam’s speaking voice, or the distinct rind of 21st century celebrity that still clings to co-star Robert Pattinson like the dying traces of yesterday’s cologne, someone could easily be fooled into thinking that “The Lost City of Z” was shot 40 years ago. In fact, that might be the greatest compliment a viewer could pay writer-director James Gray (“The Immigrant”), a man who seems increasingly determined to revive the glory days of our national cinema, when movie were pictures and auteurs were mavericks. Gray pulls from the past as liberally as Quentin Tarantino, but without the ego — he doesn’t try to process his influences through the slaughterhouse of his own…

98

Percy Fawcett, the subject under a dual-microscope in James Gray's latest memory flip-book, forces the viewer to reconsider Adventure - as a genre and as a daydream - through immense meditation to his particular obsessions and mystifying personal narrative. Being both a product of colonialism and a primitive prognosticator of empathetic relations to other cultures, he's a White Explorer desperately trying to rebel against the stigma even as he continues to roam the jungle in search of a fabled city spoken in whispers and translations comprised of miscommunication. Whether he reached his destination is unknown, but Fawcett's idealism feeds Gray's melancholic grasp on clinical study and, without revealing the trick, his own personal interpretation of the story. The Lost…

52/100

Knew basically zilch about this going in—the book hadn't crossed my path, and I avoid reading anything at all about films I definitely plan to see. So I just assumed it to be an entirely original work, since that's all Gray had previously made (apart from Two Lovers being partially/vaguely inspired by Dostoyevsky, which I'd forgotten was even the case until I fact-checked this sentence). Sometime after Fawcett returns from his second expedition and resigns from the Royal Geographical Society, however, it became clear to me that I was watching a story based on actual events, simply because no screenwriter would ever fashion such a disjointed narrative from scratch. And if I'm sitting there thinking "this is so unsatisfying,…

Uneasy mixture of magpie 20th century references (that annoying slow zoom in many classical shots) and very trendy "enlightened" politics. Why is it more interesting to depict Fawcett as not really white, not like the other white men, instead of as he was: a racist Buddhist whose search for the City of Z was a search for an advanced society formed by "white Indians." The character becomes dulled by the writing, then dulled even further by Hunnam's jockish & opaque performance w/ no eccentricity.

The only reason to make this character less interesting by modernizing him is because he is such a clear stand in for Gray and his struggle to make movies. It would be unacceptable, then, for him to…

Every time I watch a David Lean film I'm like a stuck record in saying there's no modern equivalent, well, here it is folks! It made me very happy to see such a rich and sumptuous yet also careful and restrained epic.
Sadly it didnt move me quite as much as any Lean film.
I loved the gorgeous look of the whole thing, Khondji is a master. The sweeping music was great, too. I could never really get behind Hunnam in the lead, whose weirdly off accent put me off a bit. I found a lot of the dialogue, especially between husband and wife, to be quite on the nose and dare i say rote? Fitting in but not really…