Widows probably works best as a three-minute trailer (punchy and funny) or a longform miniseries (deep and complicated). It’s a movie, though, which means we’re stuck with a fitfully engaging, 129-minute feature that only occasionally gets out of gear. The film is actually based on a miniseries, broadcast in England in the 1980s. Adapted here by Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn and director Steve McQueen, Widows tries to be a lot of different things: heist thriller, feminist statement, social-issue diagnosis. That’s a lot to bite off, and 129 minutes isn’t enough time for proper chewing.
Tag: Colin Farrell
Review: The Beguiled
The opening of The Beguiled is lush on every level: Mist hangs in the moss-draped trees as a young girl goes out mushroom-picking, her singing underscored by an uncanny low rumble. We’re in the Civil War South, so that rumble must be battle, a muffled sound that barely intrudes on the idyllic scene. This is director Sofia Coppola in signature mode, creating voluptuous sights and sounds that disguise a serious deficiency of ideas. The Beguiled may be the most inert of Coppola’s films, a vapid cruise through an isolated hothouse. Along with its other shortcomings, it’s not nearly as interesting (and nowhere near as perverse) as the 1971 film that precedes it, directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood.
Review: The Lobster
Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in ‘The Lobster’
During his preliminary interview upon arrival at the program, David is asked the big question. If he does not fall in love with someone during his 45-day stay, what animal would he like to be transformed into? David chooses the lobster. His reasons are fully thought-out: Lobsters live for 100 years, they remain fertile, and they have blue blood, like aristocrats. Plus, he likes the sea. He’s been swimming for years.
The Lobster is like this: full of specific detail, but coy about saying what the hell is actually going on. It’s the first English-language film by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose 2009 Dogtooth was a fine exercise in making skin crawl. Like that film, The Lobster comes on like a vaguely sinister George Saunders story, where it takes a while for the actual parameters of this self-contained world to disclose themselves. So we’ll tread lightly on blowing the plot.
‘Winter’s Tale’: Colin Farrell in a Dopey Time-Travel Tale
Jessica Brown Findlay and Colin Farrell
Valentine’s Day is early to call a contest closed, but will 2014 possibly offer a dopier movie than Winter’s Tale? With its time-traveling hero, white flying horse, and philosophical bromides (“Can’t you see that everything is connected by the light?”), this movie is like enduring a weekend at a quasi-religious education camp where everyone smiles as vapidly as our doomed, brave heroine.
Winter’s Tale opens with two late-19th-century immigrants being turned away at Ellis Island and casting adrift their infant son in U.S. waters. (Doesn’t seem credible? It’s magical realism, baby. Just go with it.) The kid floats to shore and grows up to be adorable rascal Peter Lake (Colin Farrell), who adopts the winged white horse while outrunning the vengeance of Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe, still in Les Miz mode).