Andy's Film Blog: *** 1/2

Showing posts with label *** 1/2. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Hostiles

An embittered cavalry officer and notorious Indian killer (Christian Bale) is commissioned against his will to escort a long imprisoned chief (Wes Studi) and his family from New Mexico to their tribal home in Montana. Along the way, they pick up a young woman (Rosamund Pike) who just saw her husband and daughters slaughtered by natives, and encounter danger from both sides of their dispute. Scott Cooper's Hostiles is historical revisionism and apologism, but incredibly well-crafted on beautiful locations with an affecting Bale lead performance and a capable supporting cast.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Wormwood

A docu-investigation into the death of CIA scientist Frank Olson (Peter Sarsgaard) in 1953, whose fall from a 13th story window in a New York City hotel was ruled a suicide, as seen through the eyes of his son Eric whose own inquest, carried out at his own professional peril, reveals several conspiratorial and sinister layers. Errol Morris' mini documentary series is highly effective, sorrowful and scary but probably would have worked better if the live action bits were cut (though Sarsgaard's emotiveness is generally compelling) and the material was presented as a usual Morris production.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Monday, June 18, 2018

The Iceman Cometh

Dead end drunks waste away their days at a New York saloon/boarding house, talking about their delusionary dreams and begging for free drinks while awaiting a visit from a travelling salesman and fellow drunkard (Lee Marvin) to lift them out of their stupor. When he arrives however, they find a reformed and unhinged version of their former friend, now preaching to the gang to give up their "pipe dreams", much to their chagrin. John Frankenheimer's American Film Theatre production is a powerful, mournful, and comical adaptation, purportedly faithful to Eugene O'Neill's play, with great performances from old film veterans Robert Ryan, Marvin, and Frederic March surrounded by an excellent supporting cast.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Friday, June 8, 2018

The Naked Kiss

A prostitute (Constance Towers) beats up her abusive pimp and takes what is owed to her before relocating to a small village where she is run out of town by a local police chief (Anthony Eisley) and lured back into the life before finding peace as a nurse at a children's hospital and getting engaged to a millionaire (Michael Dante), a situation that proves too good to be true. Highly suggestive and melodramatic Sam Fuller B-movie is sensationalist and shocking, especially for its time. The low budget affair is crisply edited and features several memorable sequences including the opening and the morbid culmination of a strange musical number.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Bullitt

A rigid, hotshot detective (Steve McQueen) whose star is on the rise is tapped by a shrewd senator (Robert Vaughn) to protect a key witness before a federal mob trial. What begins as a simple, somewhat irritating task turns into a perilous chess game as the officer must chase the perpetrators through the sloping streets of San Francisco, contend with the increasingly irritated politico, and unravel the peculiarities at the heart of the plight. From Robert L. Pike's novel Mute Witness, Bullitt is best known today for its esteemed car chase sequence, and rightly so, but Peter Yates' film is really just a measured, solidly made procedural. While not really functioning as a character study (Jacqueline Bissett's scenes where she tries to make McQueen come to terms with his occupation only really succeed in showing off her great beauty), the movie is absolutely dynamic as a connect the dots mystery and an actioner, even if the plot is somewhat murky. And in the role that defined his career, McQueen clearly demonstrates why he earned his King of Cool moniker.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Monday, May 14, 2018

Munich

Following the 1972 Olympic Massacre which claimed the lives of eleven Israeli athletes at the hand of Black September, a PLO sect, Israel's government sanctions a Mossad agent (Eric Bana) and his heterogeneous team to carry out retaliatory hits on nine of the involved planners of the mass murder. Steven Spielberg's Munich, with a thoughtful screenplay by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner from a book by George Jonas, is intense and relevant, and unlike most thrillers doesn't settle for the easy road out.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Monday, April 9, 2018

The Asphalt Jungle

Fringe types including a ruffian career criminal (Sterling Hayden), a seedy attorney (Louis Calhern), a diner cook (James Whitmore), a numbers runner (Marc Lawrence), and an ingenious safe cracker (Sam Jaffe) just released from prison converge to execute an extremely lucrative but ultimately doomed jewelry heist. John Huston's tough, gritty, and influential noir (informing both classics and cheap imitations alike) is starkly shot, exciting and lifelike with a great cast of characters, Hayden, Calhern, Lawrence, and Jean Hagen as Hayden's doting and naive girlfriend standing out among the lot. Marilyn Monroe is unforgettable too as Calhern's mistress in her breakthrough role.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Cleo from 5 to 7

A self-involved pop singer (Corrine Marchand) walks the streets of Paris in an all-consuming anticipation of her biopsy results during the afternoon hours of the title. Agnes Varda's New Wave near real-time work is smooth, free flowing, and crisply and beautifully shot, while a little light in plot though not substance. Marchand is a unique and glamorous presence.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Thursday, March 1, 2018

The Ballad of Narayama

In a famine ravaged village, the elderly upon their 70th birthday are sent to trek up a mountain where they are to wither and die, a woman (Kinuyo Tanaka) nearing the age graciously prepares for her godforsaken journey while the rest of her family, save a grieving son, behave selfishly. Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama is a disconsolate take on self-centeredness, selflessness, and the throwaway culture regarding the elderly with the sung narration and beautiful alternately radiant, verdant, and grim artificial looking sets creating a distinctive atmosphere. Tanaka is magnificent.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

I, Tonya

Growing up indigent with a browbeating, abusive mother (Allison Janney) who pushed her relentlessly to succeed before entering into a pejorative relationship with another victimizer (Sebastian Stan), Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) rose in the figure skating (often against classist opposition) before the infamous Nancy Kerrigan incident at the hands of her husband's boneheaded, rotund, and delusional best friend (Paul Walter Hauser). Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya boasts an excellent all around cast surrounding Robbie, who branches out considerably. The filming is frenetic and exciting while evoking Goodfellas a little too closely, and pulls no punches in its unforeseen, darker subject matter.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Mulholland Drive

A chipper young woman (Naomi Watts) just arrived in L.A. finds an amnesiac (Laura Elena Harring) just involved in terrible car wreck living at her aunt's home. As unrelated plot developments start to cobble up (including the story of an arrogant director (Justin Theroux) being muscled by the mob), the two women's personas seem to merge or take on entirely different realities. David Lynch's Mulholland Drive is a film that has both baffled and frustrated me the first couple of times through it due to its resistance to reason and obstinance in the face of logic. Revisiting it again, and expecting those same exasperating feelings to return while not trying to find a coherent plotline, I surprisingly found it to be a fascinating, hypnotic, frightening, suspenseful, and still maddeningly frustrating exercise, with Lynch at the apex of both his form and strangeness. Watts is incredible in essentially a dual role.
*** 1/2 out of ****

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Monsieur Hire

While being accused of the murder of a young woman outside of his apartment complex, a well-mannered, immaculately composed peeping Tom (Michel Blanc) observes the daily rituals of his neighbor (Sandrine Bonnaire) who discovers his voyeuristic behavior and seems to return his affections. Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire, from a novel by Georges Simenon, is elegantly made and exactingly directed, with a wonderful score from Michael Nyman, and a plot that takes a surprising trajectory for such a simple premise.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Mother!

A poet (Javier Bardem) and his considerably younger wife (Jennifer Lawrence) live in their recently renovated house which had burned to cinders. Now they receive uninvited guests (Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer) who can’t take a hint and refuse to leave, with the crowd soon growing to mass proportions with apocalyptic implications and consequences. With absurdism akin to a Bunuel movie plus a tinge of Rosemary’s Baby, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is an outrageous allegory on the creative process which is fascinating to see just how far the thin premise can be stretched. Lawrence delivers an overwrought, impressive performance.

*** ½ out of ****

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Phantom Thread

A renowned, particular, and impatient London dress designer (Daniel Day-Lewis) in the 1950s grows annoyed with and dismisses his current lover before a strong willed, foreign born waitress (Vicky Krieps) catches his eye and takes her place, becoming muse and model while forging a toxic, codependent relationship and butting heads with his watchful, protective sister (Leslie Manville). P.T. Anderson's Phantom Thread, a beautifully shot, fascinating look into a sequestered world and life, is slow to start before becoming severely strange and ultimately deeply involving. It features another, (said to be his final) consummate performance from DDL and another acute, obsessive and slightly inhuman characterization. Krieps is magnetic, holding her own with her intimidating partner and Manville exhibits great control and subtle humor in an Oscar nominated performance.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Saturday, January 27, 2018

All the Money in the World

Oil magnate and world's richest man J. Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer) refuses to pay the $17 million ransom of his kidnapped grandson, after he was abducted while living in Italy, instead opting to put an ex-CIA agent (Mark Wahlberg) on the case who teams up with the boy's persistent and grief stricken mother (Michelle Williams). Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World is an intelligent and solidly crafted if a little overlong thriller, unnerving in doses, with a delicious performance from Christopher Plummer who famously joined the cast in the 11th hour after Kevin Spacey was scrubbed from the picture. Wahlberg is welcomely subdued and Williams contributes another excellent, overlooked turn.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Diary of a Lost Girl

The daughter (Louise Brooks) of a pharmacist is raped by her father's assistant and is sent away to a medieval reformatory and then a whorehouse before receiving her inheritance and achieving her belated redemption. Daring and still ribald, G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl is consummately directed (the reformatory scenes are virtuosic) with impeccable black and white cinematography and a surprising lack of intertitles.A beautiful Brooks commands out sympathy.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Saturday, January 20, 2018

La Cérémonie

A maid (Sandrine Bonnaire) concealing an illiteracy problem and a violent incident in her past goes to work for a benign, bourgeois family (headed by Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Cassel) and befriends an unstable local postal clerk (Isabelle Huppert) also with skeletons in her closet, a relationship rooted in pseudo lesbianism and class jealousy that devolves into mayhem. Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie is a cold-blooded class conflict movie, slow-paced, involving, and ultimately harrowing. The cast, especially Bisset, is exceptional.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Friday, December 22, 2017

Darkest Hour

May 1940. With the Nazis beating the British Army back to the French shores and invasion imminent, Neville Chamberlain resigns as Prime Minister over calls for his ouster and accusations of appeasing Hitler. In his place steps the unlikely, unpopular in his own party, larger than life Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) who must not only lead an improbable evacuation at Dunkirk but convince the nation that the favored capitulation to Germany is the absolute wrong move. Darkest Hours loses steam and much of its impressively sustained intensity towards the finale (including an ill-advised scene of Churchill riding the Underground and gaining affirmation from the people before his big “On the Beaches” speech) but is extremely well crafted throughout by Joe Wright and Oldman, under half a ton of makeup, creates a full-bodied character and brings a full life force to the prime minister. The supporting class is excellent including Ben Mendelsohn as a disbelieving King George VI, Stephen Dillane as his cunning rival Viscount Halifax, and Kristin Scott Thomas as his loyal, secondary wife.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Casino Royale

After committing his final two, decidedly messy kills to achieve “00” status, Bond (Daniel Craig) is set on the trail of Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), a bloody eyed money launderer for terrorists, which culminates in a high stakes Texas Hold ‘em style poker tournament in Montenegro, where he is monitored by a beautiful and tortured British Treasury agent (Eva Green). Casino Royale, a reboot to the long running series, is one of the best in the line thanks to a moody, vulnerable Craig, a gorgeous, similarly conflicted Green, meaningful dialogue, strong plotting, the usual set pieces, and a great villainous turn from Mikkelsen, who ranks in terms of the best Bond baddies. The film is also functional as a pretty decent poker movie.

*** ½ out of ****

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Hobson's Choice

The drunken widowed owner (Charles Laughton) of a Victorian era London boot shop decides to marry off two of exasperating daughters while keeping his eldest Maggie (Brenda de Banzie) for her usefulness in running the business and taking care of himself. Instead, she opts to blaze her own trail by taking up with the simple bootmaker (John Mills) and put her father in a precarious, optionless situation. One of David Lean's rare forays into comedy, Hobson's Choice is a lighthearted work with a bit of gristle and vitriole boasting top of the line camerawork and black and white cinematography. Laughton is in rare, hilarious form and de Banzie and Mills round out the cast with complete, supreme performances.

*** 1/2 out of ****