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Robert Eggers' latest is a big ball of contradictions. It is at once his most ambitious, an epic sprawl of historical carnality, that is also his simplest and most direct screenplay to date. That choice makes it his most accessible film, but one that delights in stomach churning violence and surrealism that are likely to ward off big swaths of the broader audience. Based on the inspiration of Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Northman feels of a piece with…
Charlie don't surf!
Death from above, 1979. From its opening images to its haunting close, Coppola's greatest film presents an irradiated visual wonder, sweaty images of Great American Men, superimposed with the citric acid color palette of the Vietnam jungle. War is hell, so they say, and this trip down up the river adapts [Mank voice:] "lesser Joe Conrad" into Dante Alighieri and finds man's heart of darkness in the deepest part of the inferno.
The hallucinogenic nightmare trip is…
Don't let Gaspar's most humane film fool you. In Noé's world, where time destroys everything, the compassion is the cruelty. Vortex is a sharp departure from his usual brand of carnal violence, but it hollows you out just the same. To some degree, each work in his catalog explores the cruel division between the insignificance and fragility of human bodies, minds and lives and the profound significance each one has for all of us. We live within a dream, and…
But this violence, from a very little girl...
A precursor to Akerman's legendary Jeanne Dielman and the brilliant works of Claire Denis, Michael Haneke and several other European auteurs, this depiction of domestic desolation is yet another formally experimental winner by Marguerite Duras. It's a bit of a slow burn, as the comps should imply, largely a series of women doing chores and droning, one-sided conversations. The performances are still, yet twitchy, illuminating an underlying restlessness beneath each glazed expression.…
Christopher Nolan is here to save cinema as we know it the only way he knows how, and in a way only his most fanatical devotees could love - an expensive looking, action-stuffed James Bond pastiche with funky video game mechanics. This movie has exactly two modes: ceaseless exposition and loud, convoluted setpieces, yet no matter how didactically it explains its physics to you, the mechanics never come close to making sense. It's horribly apropos that a third of the…
