There’s a Hitchcockian simplicity to Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s Beckett,” a man-on-the-run thriller that benefits as much from what it doesn’t do as what it does.
John David Washington plays the title character, an American vacationing in Greece with his girlfriend April (Alicia Vikander).
On a winding rural road at night Becket falls asleep behind the wheel. He awakens to find April unconcious, their vehicle having careened down a steep hill and smack into a farmhouse.
Before passing out Beckett witnesses a woman and a red-haired boy, apparently the residents.
After a couple of days in the hospital and traumatic phone calls back to the States, our man is interviewed by the local police chief (Panos Karonos) who informs him that the farmhouse into which he crashed had been unoccupied for years.
Certain that he saw someone in the house immediately after the accident, Beckett returns to the scene…only to find himself dodging bullets from the cop and a female cohort (Lena Kitsopoulou). Obviously the Yank has stumbled across some deep dark secret; now he’s being framed as a criminal.
So he goes on the run, desperate to get to Athens and sanctuary in the American embassy.
And that’s about all the plot that matters. Later on “Beckett” will dabble in international politics and assassination, but mostly this is a hang-on-by-your-fingernails tale of close escapes and mounting paranoia in a drop-dead beautiful setting.
“Beckett” works because Washington’s character is not some sort of superhero or MacGuyer-esque genius. He’s a grief-wracked everyguy who survives as much through pure luck as smart thinking.
Only once, in the final chase, does Becket do something patently unrealistic, and by that time we’re in a forgiving mood.
“The Green Knight” is writer/director David Lowery’s big-screen adaptation of the 500-year-old epic poem (we don’t know the author) “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”
As such you might expect a big dose of sword and sorcery and some major-league action/adventure violence.
Think again. Lowery’s narrative approach has more in common with Robert Bresson’s austere “Lancelot du Lac” than with, say, the atavistic carnage of “Braveheart.”
Here he is attempting cinematically to approximate the experience of reading a long poem from a distant past. In doing so he embraces storytelling that eschews rational explanations and psychological realism.
And yet “The Green Knight” is not a relic preserved in amber. The film is a visual tour de force thanks to the splendid cinematography of Andrew Droz Palermo (he shot Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” as well as the KC-area lensed documentary “Rich Hill”), the costumes by Malgosia Turnsganza and the production design of Jade Healy.
Periodically Lowery inserts distinctively modern perspectives into this ancient tale. An example: We first meet knight-in-training Gawain (Dev Patel in a true star-making performance) awakening in a whorehouse on Christmas morning. Actually, he gets a bucket of water in the face, courtesy of his playful plebian lover (Alicia Vikander).
As he wanders through the bustling bordello in search of his boots, Gawain is teased by other guests and harlots, who kid him about spending more time partying than on his knightly training. The dialogue and camerawork bring a sense of naturalism and everyday immediacy.
Dev Patel
The movie’s distinctively modern moments coexist with a sort of formal pageantry. The result is a film that is overwhelmingly an intellectual/visual experience rather than an emotional one.
“The Green Knight” is probably going to divide audiences into lovers (it’s an overwhelmingly poetic/mystical experience) and haters (too long, too slow, not enough action).
A Yuletide celebration in the court of Gawain’s uncle King Arthur (Sean Harris) and his queen (Kate Dickie) is interrupted by the arrival of the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), a towering figure who appears to be half tree (I was reminded of Groot from the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise). This ominous visitor proposes a contest. He will receive a blow from any of Arthur’s knights; in a year’s time that knight must seek out the Green Knight and stand to receive the same blow.
Young Gawain, apparently smitten with visions of glory, accepts the challenge and with Arthur’s sword strikes off the visitor’s head. The Green Knight is nonplussed…he picks up his severed noggin and rides off with a laugh and a reminder that they will meet again next Christmas.
The bulk of the film unfolds on Gawain’s trek north to meet his fate. Along the way he is befriended by a fox (Is it a real animal? A CG effect? Whatever, it’s really convincing). He is waylaid by a talky peasant (Barry Keoghan) who pilfers the remains of slain soldiers.
He spends a chaste night with a young woman named Winnifred (Erin Kellyman), and shares several days with a Lord (Joel Edgarton) and his cooly seductive wife (Vikander again).
At one point on his wanderings he encounters a migration of fog-enshrouded giants, huge naked hairless figures who might have stepped out of one of the recent “Alien” movies.
“The Green Knight” is jammed with symbolism that will probably be lost on anyone not schooled in medievalism. Some of the episodes seem arbitrary and pointless.
Much as he did with “A Ghost Story,” Lowery explores alternate realities. In one instance the camera spins to show Gawain hogtied on the ground, then as a rotting skeleton, and then alive again as he struggles to free himself.
And the last 10 minutes is a sort of “Last Temptation of Christ” fantasy in which Gawain’s mind explores the life he might have had (a life in which he is a mighty king).
At its core this is a tale about a young man who acts impulsively and then must live with the consequences; will Gawain have the inner resolve to submit to the Green Knight’s blade? Or will he bring shame on himself and Arthur’s court?
What’s remarkable about Patel’s performance is that he talks about none of this, but the emotions bubbling beneath the surface are perfectly clear. Sometimes words aren’t necessary.
Julie Taymor’s “The Glorias” isn’t your conventional biopic. Often it seems to be less about Gloria Steinem the person than about the Women’s Movement as seen from Steinem’s perspective.
The results are hugely informative (and required viewing for all young women) but, for most of the film’s long running time, emotionally remote. Only in the final inspiring moments (featuring footage of the real Steinem addressing the “Pink Pussy” women’s march on Washington early in the Trump presidency) does the enormity of Steinem’s contributions hit home.
Based on Steinem’s autobiography My Life on the Road, the film is nevertheless classic Julie Taymor. The story is told with a shuffled chronology with four actresses (Lulu Wilson, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore) portraying Steihem at various stages of life. Occasionally the older Gloria will share the screen with her younger selves in a series of interior dialogues.
There are animated sequences and lots of cinematic sleight of hand; the images shift from black-and-white to color (and sometimes just a splash of color in an otherwise b&w palette).
As is usually the case with Taymor, these inventions are arresting, sometimes shockingly dramatic, and provide sly commentary on the action. Yet I can’t help but wonder if in the end they tend to push us away from her subject; “The Glorias” may be too busy for its own good.
But we do learn a lot about Steinem. Like her childhood of near constant travel with a father (Timothy Hutton) who was a sort of benign con man (“If you don’t know what happens tomorrow, it could be wonderful”) and, later, her adolescence as caregiver to her emotionally fragile mother (Enid Graham).
There’s her lifelong love of tap dancing, presented here as a musical number unfolding in a black barber shop in the 1950s.
We see her post-college sabbatical in India, where young Gloria (now played by Vikander) is sensitized to the harsh lot of women.
Her writing career flourishes despite the myopic outlooks of her male editors. She becomes a household name for donning a Bunny suit to report on the lives of women working in the Playboy Club; thereafter she must endure being cast as the movement’s resident sex object. In fact, she fights for most of her life not to be viewed as the movement’s voice. Ironically, in the early days she was terrified of public speaking.
“When a man knows he’s to be hanged in a fortnight,” observed Samuel Johnson, “it focuses his mind most wonderfully.”
How the siblingsat the center of “Euphoria” focus their minds (or refuse to do so) on imminent mortality is very much the concern of writer/director Lisa Langseth, who initially poses one mystery, only to have it supplanted by a much deeper one.
Ines (Alicia Vikander) returns to Europe at the request of her sister Emilie (Eva Green). She hasn’t been home for more than a decade, during which time she built a career as an artist in NYC. Never much of a family person, Ines has delayed this reunion; she’s only doing it now as a way of fleeing the bad reviews of her latest exhibition.
She finds her sister in a curiously spendthrift frame of mind. Emilie has booked them into a posh hotel and treats her sis to a very expensive dinner. The money, Emilie claims, comes from the sale of her home.
But the big surprise is a trip to Switzerland where Emilie has booked the pair into a posh resort in the middle of a lush forest.
Only when they arrive at their destination does Ines realize what’s going on. Unbeknownst to her, Emilie has been fighting cancer for years; this is less a vacation than a brief meditative retreat to be followed by a staff-assisted suicide.
There’s a world of weeping on display in “The Light Between Oceans.”
The good news is that most of the sobbing is done by Alicia Vikander. If you’ve got to stare for two hours at a tear-stained face, it might as well be that of this Oscar-winning actress. She makes suffering almost transcendent.
The not-so-good news is that in making its transition from best seller to big screen, M.L. Stedman’s story has lost a good deal of its power.
For all the lacerating emotions displayed by Vikander and co-stars Michael Fassbender and Rachel Weisz, relatively little of it is experienced by the viewer.
What was deeply moving on the printed page seems mechanically melodramatic when dramatized. You want to be moved, but can’t shake the feeling that mostly you’re being manipulated.
After four years in the trenches of World War I, Tom Sherbourne (Fassbender) returns to his native Australia a hollow man. Seeking solitude and time to rediscover himself, he signs up as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Island, a windswept hunk of rock 100 miles from the nearest coast.
But he won’t be alone for long. In one of the most satisfying passages in Derek Cianfrance’s film, he meets, woos and weds Isabel (Vikander), a local girl who seems to relish life on the island. Their’s is a civilization of two…the only thing that could make it better would be a baby to share the experience.
Fate has other plans. Isabel suffers a miscarriage (during a hurricane, no less) and later gives birth to a stillborn child. Things are looking pretty glum.
And then a rowboat floats in on the tide. Inside is a dead man and a baby girl. (more…)
Eddie Redmayne had best clear a place on the mantel for his second (in as many years) Oscar for best actor.
In “The Danish Girl” the chameleonic Brit gives a quietly devastating performance as the world’s first recipient of a sex change operation.
The latest film from director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon (adapting David Ebershoff’s 2000 novel) is, depending upon how you choose to look at it, a story of personal triumph or one of tragedy.
In either case, there’s no arguing with the perfs of Redmayne or Alicia Vikander (another likely Oscar contender).
In the mid 1920s Einar Wegener (Redmayne) is the toast of the Copenhagen art scene. He does landscapes — actually the same landscape, with a grove of trees on the shore of a fiord, but he mixes it up enough that one is reminded of Monet painting the same haystacks over and over.
Wegner’s wife Gerda (Vikander) is a painter, too, albeit a frustrated one. Her portraits of the local bourgeoise aren’t lighting a fire under anyone.
When one of Gerda’s models, a ballerina, fails to show up for a sitting she asks her husband to pull on women’s hosiery and fill in for the missing beauty. One set of legs apparently is as good as another.
Despite an initial protest, Einar finds himself strangely moved by the experience. So much so that the couple decide that he will attend a local arts ball in woman’s clothing and a flapperish red wig. Gerda introduces this shy woman as Einar’s country cousin, Lili Elbe.
Einar is shocked and then pleased with a young man (Ben Wishaw) begins paying attention, even taking him/her to a private corner for a tentative kiss.
From that point on the artist prefers to spend his days as Lili. Einar begins to fade away.
Mishandled, this sort of material can come off as vaguely ridiculous, even campy. Redmayne and Hooper are having none of that. Their thesis is that Lili has always lurked inside Einar. She is his true essence, and now she’s been freed.
There’s plenty of gastro porn on display in “Burnt”: fruits and veggies exploding in vibrant colors, lusciously marbled meats, clouds of steam and rings of blue flame, plates of edibles arranged with the precision/happy chaos of a modernist painting.
In most other regards director John Wells’ film about a megalomaniacal chef working his way toward redemption is standard-issue stuff. Yeah, it accurately captures the politics and pecking order of a high-end restaurant kitchen (as did the recent sleeper hit “Chef”).
But the big story, the big drama, never materializes.
The film has an invaluable asset in Bradley Cooper, who even when playing a dick oozes charisma. But this yarn (screenplay by Steven Knight, story by Michael Kalesniko) relies too much on stock characters and time-tested dramatic devices without ever digging deep.
Adam Jones (Cooper) is a once-acclaimed chef at a top Paris restaurant. But his career ran aground on drugs, drink and women (a common-enough narrative among this breed) and he retreated to New Orleans where he got sober, gave up sleeping around, and got a lowly job shucking oysters. After working his way through exactly 1 million of the mollusks (he kept meticulous records of his shucking activities) Adam walked out the door and caught a flight to London.
Having dragged down the great Sherlock Holmes to our world of short-attention-span cinema, Guy Ritchie now turns his camera on a fondly remembered TV series from the 1960s.
And, to give credit where it’s due, he has had the good sense to go easy on his usual hyperkinesis. “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” isn’t particularly memorable, but it introduces some interesting ideas and avoids the most headache-inducing elements of this director’s style.
The original was television’s answer to the James Bond craze. Unlike the overtly satiric “Get Smart,” “U.N.C.L.E.” (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) took a dry, tongue-in-cheek approach to international spying.
And in Napoleon Solo (portrayed back in the day by Robert Vaughn) the series gave us an impossibly unruffled, cooler-than-cool protagonist, who could view his own imminent demise with sardonic indifference. The series was so huge it spawned action figures, toy guns and much more — one of the lunchboxes even has a home at the Smithsonian now.
Ritchie and a small army of writers give us an origin story that is less impressive for its dramatic elements than for its painstaking re-creation of swinging Europe in the ’60s.
Things get off to a busy start when the nattily dressed Solo (Henry Cavill, the current Superman) enters squalid East Berlin to spirit Gaby (“Ex Machina’s” Alicia Vikander), a tomboyish auto mechanic, over the Berlin Wall to freedom.
Their escape is almost foiled by a Soviet agent (Armie Hammer), who with his slow-burn, hulking presence and almost superhuman strength seems a close relation to Robert Shaw’s assassin in “From Russia With Love.”
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