Spencer (Pablo Larraín, 2021). Chilean director Pablo Larraín brings the airy, arty approach of his 2016 film Jackie to another iconic female figure on the world stage. As in the earlier drama, Larraín keeps the focus on a few days, … Continue reading Then Playing — Spencer; No Man of Her Own; The Southerner
No (Pablo Larraín, 2012). In Chile in the late nineteen-eighties, the dictatorial government of General Augusto Pinochet orchestrated a public vote to give the populace a chance to weigh in on whether or not they’d maintain control for another eight years after a decade-and-a-half of bludgeoning rule. With various systems under tight control and the people largely cowed by governmental forces, it was expected to be a mere formality on the way to maintaining continuity, a show of phony democracy to appease the international community. Instead, Pinochet was ousted. In this consideration by screenwriter Pedro Peirano and director Pablo Larraín, the … Continue reading Larraín, Lubitsch, Riley, Snyder, Sollett
Hardly a grizzled old soul at the age of thirty-five, Natalie Portman has nonetheless been working in film long enough — over twenty years — to have distinctive phases of her career. Without being precise about the timing of each shift (though I certainly could for anyone foolhardy and masochistic enough to ask me to), I’d say she’s already gone from child actor to precocious ingenue to adult actor. Presumptive as it might be to make too bold a declaration on the basis of a single performance, the new film Jackie could very mark the beginning of a convincing transformation into … Continue reading Now Playing: Jackie
Coffee for Two 