Driving is an androgynous slob. Could be a woman, a man or a mime — she actually looks like Marcel Marceau without makeup. It’s raining, drizzling over her windshield, drops that produce a mud the wipers intermittently splatter onto her sight. When she arrives where she was going to, we watch her leaving her car,…
A light-hearted score by Jed Kurzel (“The Snowtown Murders”) punctuates Slow West, first-time director John Maclean’s 84-minute deconstruction of the myth of the frontier. Winner of the grand jury prize in the international dramatic competition at Sundance, the U.K.-New Zealand co-production is a slow burn that is awash in contradictions. Starring Michael Fassbender (“12 Years…
Frank is a man of many walls. He’s been building them for as long as he can remember, but it was only during his early teens that he actually got his first one made by his dad for a costume party that never was. Frank wears a big papier-mâché head over his mask — a…
Science fiction has long explored the question of what it is to be human. This philosophical topic has involved different non-human figures, such as extra-terrestrials in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “Avatar,” clones in “Never Let Me Go” and “The Island” and perhaps most frequently, artificial intelligence. Films such as “Metropolis,” “2001: A Space…
By their nature, submarine movies lend themselves to easy criticism — in terms of wordplay that is. Analogies such as “the performances were so painfully lacking that they ‘sunk’ the entire film” or “why watch this film when it should be isolated and submerged beneath two miles of ocean?” could easily take form. Luckily enough…
Mike Leigh’s film Mr. Turner centers on the last twenty-five years of the life of the acclaimed 19th century English landscape painter, J.M.W. Turner. Though the film, with the strong assistance of cinematographer Dick Pope, succeeds in capturing the look and feel of the time as well as the essence of Turner’s beautiful landscapes and…
Mind games are afoot in Alex Garland’s upcoming sci-fi thriller Ex Machina. And Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) finds himself in the middle of them as he gets much more than he bargained for when he is selected to evaluate how well a newly developed artificial intelligence represents human intellect and behavior. In the form of a…
