2016 Directed by James Gray
A true-life drama in the 1920s, centering on British explorer Col. Percy Fawcett, who discovered evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilization in the Amazon and disappeared whilst searching for it.
Charlie Hunnam Robert Pattinson Sienna Miller Tom Holland Angus Macfadyen Edward Ashley Clive Francis Ian McDiarmid Franco Nero Matthew Sunderland Johann Myers Daniel Huttlestone Harry Melling Pedro Coello Aleksandar Jovanović Yelena Solovey Bobby Smalldridge Tom Mulheron Nathaniel Bates Fisher Murray Melvin Michael Jenn Michael Ford-FitzGerald Frank Clem Bethan Coomber David Calder Stacy Shane Pat Mooney Colin Carnegie Anthony Boyle Show All…
Brad Pitt Mark Huffam Dede Gardner James Gray Marc Butan Anthony Katagas Jeremy Kleiner Felipe Aljure Dale Armin Johnson
Northern Ireland Screen Plan B Entertainment Sierra/Affinity MICA Entertainment MadRiver Pictures Keep Your Head
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…
It's rare to find a movie these days that believes in adventure and sincerity and pure storytelling as interchangeable qualities, and lives up to all of them.
To dream to seek the unknown. To look for what is beautiful is its own reward. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?
me: i'm tired of white men
charlie hunnam:
me: actually can i have five more of these little blonde bitches?
"am i dreaming this?.."
"... i think i was dreaming"
reconciling a vision of the truly wondrous with the deeply rooted failure of the human condition—our spirituality, humanity, dreams (reflected tangibly or not), inseparable from the horrors of imperial "peace", senseless bloodshed and the very nature of time. there's very little distinction between the victory and the cost when the whole world has set itself afire... a single destination with many delirious, mysterious roads.
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,…
can't watch this without crying intermittently. whole thing remains one of last decade's best, but its last twenty minutes knock the wind out of me every time. Sienna Miller just transcendent throughout, Hunnam never better, happy birthday to Robert Pattinson.
98
Gray's triumph over the tricky delicacy and tenderness of a well-timed match cut is nothing less than majestic. One in particular, matching a household fixture with a remnant of the front in WWI, reorients the space as one environment, both wasting moments as Fawcett yearns for the winding greenery and mysteries of the Jungle once again, shackled to necessities of family and honor. Just a remarkable, remarkable work.
