“Oh, God, make small the old star-eaten blanket of the sky, that I may fold it round me and in comfort lie” — T.E. Hulme, “The Embankment” When I first heard about British director Andrew Haigh’s (“45 Years”) Lean on Pete, it sounded like a warm, cuddly drama about horses, perhaps an updated version of…
It is a bold filmmaker who trusts film as film and allows the medium to communicate without recourse to exposition and dialogue. Such a filmmaker is Lynne Ramsey (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”), whose latest offering, You Were Never Really Here, is a brilliantly brutal assembly of image and sound that never displays any…
The digital age is slickly skewered on the sharp blade of a knife that cuts a clean swath of revenge through a wealthy family’s existence in sick satirist Yorgos Lanthimos’ genre-blurring The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Lanthimos buries his satirical observations deep and then brushes away select portions of the surface to reveal grim…
In Una, the powerful screen adaptation of David Harrower’s play “Blackbird” about the sexual abuse of a thirteen-year-old girl, Australian director Benedict Andrews does what has become increasingly uncommon in modern cinema — he makes us think. While it may be uncomfortable to look outside of the reassuring categories of victim and victimizer, Andrews asks…
Over two decades ago, the British film scene was drastically up-rooted and challenged by the likes of an ambitious, dangerously addictive film centered on a closely knit group of Scottish junkies. That, and dead head-twisting babies crawling on ceilings. Danny Boyle’s on-screen adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting” was a definite first in venturing into explicit…
“Art thou pale for weariness of climbing heaven and gazing on Earth, wandering companionless?” — Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To The Moon” A film about loss, loneliness, and love, Todd Haynes’ (“I’m Not There”) Carol is the story of Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”), a nineteen year-old salesgirl whose chance encounter…
Cinema has the ability to document, dramatize, inspire and educate. Suffragette succeeds in doing all of these things, while also being hugely engaging and entertaining. Writer Abi Morgan and director Sarah Gavron, along with a committed cast including Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Whishaw and (very briefly) Meryl Streep, deliver…
