Category: Film Reviews

At first glance, Bob Ferguson and Daniel Plainview, the protagonists of PTA’s One Battle After Another and There Will Be Blood, respectively, seem to be opposites. Bob is bumbling, overwhelmed by loss, trying to hold on to a fragment of love; Plainview is domineering, megalomaniacal, visionary. But it’s a question of angle. What we actually…

Rabeh’s take: Granite cliffs demarcate land and sea. We are told this is a border. Where life as we know it ends, and another, foreign and hidden, begins. But our bodies are made of water. The Outrun reminds us there is no difference between what happens within the vessel of our bodies and all that…

Each of us would like to believe that we would rise to the occasion. We would like to believe that if the suffering of the other were horrific enough, we would dedicate ourselves to the cause of love, regardless of the cost to ourselves. That’s nearly exactly the opposite of how most of us actually…

The idea at the heart of Children of Men is unclear. “Hope” is an easy answer, but too easy. Cuarón realizes his vision well; we the viewers feel like we’re living within the gray capitalist endgame, our hope of rebirth both metaphorically and literally almost gone. Sometimes, as in the car-in-reverse scene, the feeling is…

At first approximation—from the eye of God, say, or extraterrestrials—each detail of human life is dramatically equivalent. The terrible enormous wars, a forgettable melody, walking to the corner store, falling in love. That’s not to say that it’s all trivial; just the opposite. It’s all utterly astonishing, a collision of physical and biological fortune that…

Corporation destroys lives and hides its crimes; a hero employee can no longer deny their conscience and takes on the beast. We’ve been here before, at least in cinema. (The heroism part is less common in the real world). That Michael Clayton is nevertheless riveting is a credit to the tight scripting, unobtrusive direction, and…

Jacques Tati’s PlayTime was, famously, a flop. Tati built an enormous stage on the outskirts of Paris, at great cost. Audiences didn’t come and critics were divided. Over time, however, the film has come to be regarded as a masterpiece, simultaneously a statement on the confusing hollowness of modernity and a depiction of human resistance.…