Posted in: Film Reviews

Review: Last Days of Disco

[Originally written for Film.com, 1998]

Set the wayback machine to 1998. Parallax View presents reviews of films released 20 years ago, written by our contributors for various papers and websites. Most of these have not been available for years.

Characters from Whit Stillman’s previous films, Metropolitan and Barcelona, turn up in cameo roles amongst the busy dance-floor scene-makers in The Last Days of Disco. Aside from stitching these movies together in the same milieu and class, these re-appearances have the effect of rounding off Stillman’s unofficial trilogy; as such, Last Days is an appropriately wry letting go, a sad-edged valentine to an endearingly absurd era in American culture.

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Posted in: by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Beatriz at Dinner

In Beatriz at Dinner, Salma Hayek’s face is cleansed of glamour. But even more noticeable is the expression she wears: empathetic yet often empty, as though a life of being around affluent people had trained her character to wear a mask of watchful neutrality. This is apt, because she plays Beatriz, a Mexican immigrant who works as a holistic healer in Hollywood—her clients are the very rich, albeit the kind who believe in mind-body interventions and shamanism. Beatriz’s poker face is all the more impressive because her brand of medicine requires her to take on the pain of her patients, rendering her something like an old-fashioned saint.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly