Present-day parable of Paradise Found and Paradise Lost: more precisely, a legendary island Shangri-La somewhere near Thailand (from the air it looks like Never-Never Land in Disney's Peter Pan, meaning, among other things, that it looks painted instead of photographed), home to a Hippie Commune cum Club Med, as well …
Four damaged souls in various stages of recovery — filmmaker Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) from depression and booze, rock star Marianne (Tilda Swinton) from damaged vocal cords, nymphet Penelope (Dakota Johnson) from fatherlessness, and record producer Harry (Ralph Fiennes) from, well, his life up to now — meet up at an …
Jim Jarmusch's mainstreamiest film to date has a lot of laughs in it, despite the pretentiousness of the cinéma d'ennui pacing and deliberately dissatisfying ending. Laughs are laughs, nonetheless, and once they've fought through the pretentiousness, they cannot be wiped off the scoreboard. (Another impediment to be fought through, another …
The Coen brothers revisit their favored stupidity theme: Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski (that one above all), O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the secondhand Ladykillers, at least the Llewellyn Moss protagonist in No Country for Old Men. Back to the well once more. The placement of this …
The mythic children's book by C.S.Lewis makes for a good children's film, better, to pick a couple of nearby co-ordinates, than any of the Harry Potters, better than any third of The Lord of the Rings, albeit still rather longish at two hours and twenty minutes. In the first place, …
Soporific supernaturalism, notwithstanding some startling special effects, with Keanu Reeves as a cool-dude demonologist in a long coat, doomed to Hell for a momentarily successful suicide attempt, and ticketed to an early grave, even now, for a pack-a-day smoking habit. Tilda Swinton, of all people, is cast as the angel …
The central conceit, and little else, has been retained from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story of the same name: a protagonist who ages in reverse. (The story of course was written and titled before the soundalike name of Benjamin Britten came to fame, and as long as they were …
The scary (and gory) things on screen may be zombies, but the real monster here is the troll in the director’s chair. Jim Jarmusch and friends (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, et alia) have a laugh at the audience’s expense with a film that starts off sounding good, looking …
The lady-in-distress storyline, unspooled on a smallness of scale that could nowadays be maintained only in an independent film, is agreeably old-fashioned, as you would expect when you know that it's a remake of a top-drawer 1949 melodrama by Max Ophuls, The Reckless Moment. The introduction of an explicit homosexual …
Returning to a hotel now haunted by its mysterious past, an artist and her elderly mother confront long-buried secrets in their former family home. From director Joanna Hogg and starring Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton, Carly-Sophia Davies, Zinnia Davies-Cooke.
The premise, or thesis, taken from a work of nonfiction by Dr. Louise J. Kaplan and spelled out on screen in a printed preamble, asserts that conformance to the "normal" is the biggest perversion of all. Or something like that. First-time filmmaker Susan Streitfeld has attempted, with some degree of …
My appreciation of the films of Wes Anderson began curdling halfway through The Royal Tenenbaums. His star on the rise, Anderson began buying into his own press and from it emerged a style that, even with the best intentions, tended to engulf, rather than inform. What followed was children’s wallpaper …
Remember movies? The Coen brothers do. Westerns, romances, musicals, dance extravaganzas — the works. (All of which are on gorgeous, indulgent display here.) Millions of people used to look to them for — in the words of Capitol Pictures’ Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) — “information, uplift, and yes, entertainment.” Kind …
It’s not often a director remakes their own film, and even rarer for a feature to be reimagined in short form. Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and The Human Voice both share as their source material Jean Cocteau’s one-act monodrama La Voix Humaine. With a …
The mad passion of a wealthy Milanese matron (Tilda Swinton) for the much younger chef with whom her son has entered a restaurant partnership. Thus, there’s a food-film ingredient from the shelf of Babette’s Feast, Big Night, Like Water for Chocolate, Mostly Martha, and the like — a sensual awakening, …