If predictability was insight, if the familiar was shocking, if everyone hadn’t already watched a billion hours of Internet porn, Nymphomaniac might be the movie Lars von Trier thought he was making.
This is a movie that wants to be about truth and lies, and the nature of both. It wants to be about the ubiquity of the con. And it wants to be about the authenticity that can somehow grow in an environment of utter fakery.
From the start, All Is Lost understands what makes the survival genre great: an uncompromising dedication to what happens on the screen and a refusal to linger over why it happens or what it means.
The Place Beyond the Pines begins with a long tracking shot, and the shot acts as a summary of everything that’s good about the movie: its confidence, its ambition, and…
To be accepted, to be relevant, he would need to become someone else. He would spend the next half-century creating that person and then, at age 60, decide that it was time to reveal his true self, in Father Goose.
In Anderson’s hands, we are always on a journey into the troubled minds and hearts of men at war with themselves; to the intersection of primitive impulses and intellectual aspiration; and, never more than in The Master, through hubris, half-blind seeking, and love that destroys itself.
There are two ways of looking at Drive, the recent Ryan Gosling noir. You can consider what happens on the screen—the plot, dialogue, and action, or you can consider what doesn’t…
I remember being pretty casual last year about the illegality of theater-hopping on one ticket for an entire day, but this time around I arrive at the Boston Common 19…