Smart Words About Cinema
Contributor
It’s almost too tempting to compare Greta Gerwig and Brit Marling, indie-bred actresses who also occasionally write their own movies. Both are smart, pretty, and rising fast. But where Gerwig, the star of Frances Ha, can tap a loosey-goosey and expertly comic side, Marling is serious enough to be unnerving. And thus far, this eerily [...]
A geeky devotion to roadside attractions might directly correspond to an impulse to murder—or so it is suggested in Sightseers, a British black comedy with a gory backbeat. Come for the Tramway Village in Crich or the Pencil Museum in Keswick, stay for the head-bashing. The tourists are Chris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe), [...]
Alex Gibney is the documentary filmmaker whose politically charged exposés include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side. It makes sense that he would clamber onto the spicy tale of Julian Assange, the white-haired super-hacker whose WikiLeaks enterprise has brought down the wrath of governments and corporations. [...]
The phrase “spoiler alert” gains new currency in the realm of narrative documentary. The reveals and gotchas contained within them are probably already public record—but still, one hesitates to blow the incredible surprises of, say, Searching for Sugar Man for unsuspecting viewers. In the case of Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, we should be able [...]
Maybe it’s a lingering childhood memory of the classic book My Side of the Mountain, or a weakness for a certain kind of afternoon-daydream movie, but The Kings of Summer fell directly into my sweet spot. The movie doesn’t exist in a real world (please don’t waste energy trying to reconcile psychological motives or social [...]
The most famous children to spring from the pen of Henry James are the brother and sister from The Turn of the Screw, that celebrated and oft-filmed ghost story. The young heroine of James’ What Maisie Knew is about to receive her most prominent film exposure, albeit in a setting the author could not have [...]
From her earliest mumblecore movies, something about Greta Gerwig didn’t quite fit the scene. Here were these lo-fi indie efforts (including LOL, Hannah Takes the Stairs, and Baghead), nobly scruffy around the edges, intended as the antitheses of Hollywood—and right in the middle of them was a movie star. Hard to miss it: Gerwig may [...]
François Ozon’s parents were schoolteachers. That could account for the slyly mixed feelings he shows toward the protagonist of his new film. Meet Germain, a high-school teacher whose commitment to his profession is tested by his boredom, his frustrated dreams of being a writer, and the seductive series of papers turned in by a precocious [...]
The device at the heart of Graceland is unsavory but gripping: A flunky for a crooked politician is driving his daughter and his boss’ daughter home from school when kidnappers pounce. The baddies immediately kill one of the girls and drive away with the other, a huge ransom demand trailing in their wake. The twist? [...]
When Midnight’s Children was published in 1981, one might have assumed that its promising author would become best known as a writer of magical realism and an observer of the divide between India and Pakistan. That’s not the way it worked out for Salman Rushdie. His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was judged to be [...]
Proposed: One of the basic concerns for a storyteller is what to put in and what to leave out. That sounds really obvious. But it’s a huge deal, and deciding what should go in—as opposed to all the other stuff that might, but shouldn’t—makes the difference between a spellbinding experience and a nap. It matters [...]
The 2010 film Four Lions is about a British cell of Islamic fundamentalists plotting to plant homemade explosive devices at—among other targets—the London marathon. It’s an uproarious comedy. Too soon after the Boston bombings to recall this scathing movie? Maybe, but it shouldn’t be—Chris Morris’ prediction of stupid, self-styled jihadists looks even keener and more [...]
Pretty pictures in a movie are sometimes dismissed as eye candy, the implication being that empty calories are no substitute for the sound nutrition of noble stories and thematic depth. That may be, although it would be difficult to deny the chocolate-box allure of Renoir, a lushly photographed gloss on a real-life moment in an [...]
Robert Horton, curator of the Museum of History and Industry exhibit “Celluloid Seattle,” and Richard T. Jameson, one-time film critic of Seattle Weekly and editor of both Seattle’s own Movietone News and Film Comment (as well as frequent Parallax View contributor) will discuss Seattle’s lively film culture back through the decades in a free event at [...]
Last year when the jury members for the Reel NW prize at the Seattle International Film Festival got together, we were strongly agreed on Megan Griffiths’s film Eden as our top pick. But it would’ve been a short meeting if we hadn’t at least kicked around our next-favorites, and so we did. I made a [...]