Then Playing — Thelma; Festival; Carry-On
Reviews of films directed by Josh Margolin, Murray Lerner, and Jaume Collet-Serra Continue reading Then Playing — Thelma; Festival; Carry-On
Reviews of films directed by Josh Margolin, Murray Lerner, and Jaume Collet-Serra Continue reading Then Playing — Thelma; Festival; Carry-On
Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund, 2022). Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund’s initial inspiration for the film Triangle of Sadness was the world of fashion, as reflected by the title’s reference to the furrowed brow that earns a male model (Harris Dickinson) … Continue reading Then Playing — Triangle of Sadness; The Whale; Black Adam
Crawl (Alexandre Aja, 2019). To his credit, director Alexandre Aja clearly understands the lean and lowdown appeal of the premise to Crawl. With little fuss and effecticely shorthand character-building, Aja races headlong into the telling the story of a flooding … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Crawl; Her Smell; The Commuter
Lion (Garth Davis, 2016). The feature debut from Garth Davis — who has major cred in my book for directing half of Jane Campion’s great Top of the Lake — looks like the same achingly earnest, self-consciously award-hungry cinema the Weinsteins have been delivering since their Miramax days. For the first half of the film anyway, it’s far sharper and more compelling than that. When five-year-old Indian boy Saroo (played at that age by Sunny Pawar) gets separated from his family after boarding the wrong train, his travails lost, alone, and unable to effectively communicate about where he’s from are … Continue reading Collet-Serra, Davis, Heisler, Levine, Lewis