Thursday, September 29th, 2011
The Future
“The fault,” Cassius tells Brutus in Julius Caesar, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Just as the fault is not in the moon, but in himself, when Jason (Hamish Linklater) freezes time in Miranda July’s film The Future, and supplicates the nearest celestial object to let him off the hook. His wife, Sophie [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, July 21st, 2011
Midnight in Paris
One of the fun things to do when playing critic is envisaging analogues—whether they end up useful to real people, or not. So with The Tree of Life still branching out through my ears, it seemed inevitable for me, in the lamplight of Midnight in Paris, to extend Malick’s branch all the way to Woody [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Air Doll
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll has a completely foreign sensibility. It’s not American, and it’s not one I’d take immediately for Japanese. We see Hideo (Itsuji Itao, who looks like a pooped-out Mathieu Amalric) press his face against the glass of a commuter train window; the raindrops on the windowpane are a barrier between him and [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Greenberg
In a few years, Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg will likely be regarded as one of the quintessential indie films of its time. It isn’t a startling or groundbreaking work, but it’s a very good addition to an upper-middle-class genre. Aside from being an observant and offbeat character study, and impeccably cast—from a random hook-up on down—it [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
From the way most American films perceive Southwestern Europeans, one might think that the Old World has graduated past employment. All its inhabitants are retirees with nothing better to do than paint, write poetry, and—mais oui!—make dirty, dirty, sexy love. This atmosphere of leisure is about the opposite of the low-pressure system that perpetually hovers [...]