Authors: Angelo Muredda Archives - Page 5 of 13

Saint Laurent (2014)

May 22, 20152014, 2015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Biopic, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring Gaspard Ulliel, Jérémie Renier, Louis Garrel, Helmut Berger
screenplay by Bertrand Bonello and Thomas Bidegain
directed by Bertrand Bonello

by Angelo Muredda Bertrand Bonello enters the postmodern biopic sweepstakes with Saint Laurent, no less than the third chronicle of the titular French designer and haute couture icon in as many years. With regrets to Pierre Thoretton’s understated but chilly L‘amour fou, which comes at its subject through the reminiscences of his lifelong professional and personal partner Pierre Berge, Bonello’s project is almost certainly the most fetching (thanks in no small part to costume designer Anais Romand), marrying a contemporary fixation on the limits of biographical storytelling with the sort of impressionist brushstrokes the Matisse devotee might have appreciated. In the wake of filmmakers as disparate as Todd Haynes and Abel Ferrara self-consciously toying with the limits of the biopic form, ostensibly killing dynamic subjects by pinning them to the wall, Saint Laurent isn’t as radical a work of genre subversion as some of its adherents claim, but it sure as hell is beautiful, channelling its subject’s hedonist spirit and delicate aesthetic sensibility in roughly equal measure.

Ex Machina (2015)

April 23, 20152015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac
written and directed by Alex Garland

by Angelo Muredda Say this much for Alex Garland: there’s an early stretch in Ex Machina, his auspicious directorial debut, where one wonders if one is seeing something relatively new. That’s meant not as a backhanded compliment but as an acknowledgement that good sci-fi is hard to come by, and that impressive world-building rarely segues into sophisticated storytelling grounded in novel ideas. For probably long enough to give it a decent shelf-life, Ex Machina passes the genre sniff test about as well as its android heroine–an artificially intelligent being with the body of a European rising star–clears her own trial, a personal variation on the Turing test. If the film dips from there into a familiar, smart-alecky noir about bad men and the women they can’t control, at least credit it for deferring the inevitable.

American Sniper (2014)

January 16, 20152014, 2015, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, War

***/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner, Luke Grimes
screenplay by Jason Hall, based on the book by Chris Kyle
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda After delivering the first funereal jukebox musical in Jersey Boys just last summer, Clint Eastwood returns to better-fitting material with American Sniper, his most muscular and dramatically charged work in years, for whatever that’s worth. The common thinking about Eastwood these days–at least, outside the critical circle that deems his every tasteful composition and mild camera movement a classical masterstroke–is that his internal compass for choosing projects has been off for a while, making him susceptible to the bad taste of undistinguished screenwriters. What’s interesting about American Sniper, which works from a dicey script by Jason Hall that’s always in danger of becoming either a rote action thriller meted out in shootouts or a rote antiwar melodrama about how veterans never quite make it back home, is how obstinately it resists this narrative. Contrary to the vision of Eastwood as an efficient director prone to gliding on autopilot, American Sniper shows him forging something tough and difficult to grasp out of what might have been on-the-nose material.

FFC’s Best of ’14

January 1, 20152014, 2015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

by Walter Chaw Two things in 2014. Well, one in 2013 and one in 2014. The first was the Telluride Film Festival, which occurs on Labour Day Weekend and which I attended for the first time in a decade in 2013. The second was a conversation I had with a friend over Skype earlier this year, around the time of my 41^st birthday. They led me, those two things, to change my life from one of quiet desperation to one of perpetual stimulation and challenge. I left a major corporation and a job that provided security and some measure of stability to become general manager of the Alamo Drafthouse in my home state of Colorado. As someone who tends towards depression, it’s hardly hyperbole to say that it was a decision that probably saved my life.

The Gambler (2014)

December 24, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jessica Lange
screenplay by William Monahan, based on the screenplay by James Toback
directed by Rupert Wyatt

by Angelo Muredda "The only way out is all in," teases the dishonest poster for The Gambler, a safe adaptation of Karel Reisz and James Toback's 1974 original that would surely bore its own hero. It's hard to say who's most at fault for turning Toback's semi-autobiographical moral tale of a failed author turned debt-ridden professor into such easygoing pap–the antithesis of all-in. The contenders run from Toback's own smug paean to male irascibility in the original to Rupert Wyatt's slick commercial style, as forgettable as it is watchable. But it's tempting to put all your money on William Monahan. Oscar-certified out of the gate for The Departed's heavy philosophical nothings and largely unheralded since (except by Ridley Scott apologists), Monahan has apparently had some time to think about what it means for a serious man with serious thoughts to not quite live up to his potential. The Gambler becomes the unwitting dumping ground for all he's learned, a redemptive character study of a shitty guy who accepts congratulations for every last baby step he takes into adulthood.

Jersey Boys (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 16, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Musical

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda Clint Eastwood has never been the most self-referential filmmaker, preferring shopworn competence to flashy displays of idiosyncrasy. But it’s hard to imagine he’s not at least slightly gaming his audience throughout Jersey Boys, an otherwise limp tour through the Four Seasons‘ early discography. What else are we to make of the gag where baby-faced songwriter Bob Gaudio (Chris Klein dead ringer Erich Bergen) catches an image of his director’s grizzled mug in “Rawhide” on a hotel TV? While that feels like a pretty straightforward joke on Eastwood’s uncanny endurance all the way from “Sherry” (1962) to Jersey Boys the Broadway musical (2005), it’s a bit harder to read an equally surreal moment like the dispute between producer and sometime lyricist Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) and wise-guy guitarist Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) over the band’s sound. “I’m hearing it in sky blue,” Crewe whines in the middle of a recording session, “and you’re giving me brown.” On the one hand, it’s not like Eastwood to take the piss out of his own work, but on the other, what better analogy for his adaptation process can there be than the conversion of a sky-blue all-American songbook to a shit-brown sung résumé, rendered all in blacks and greys save for the odd splash of salmon and the occasional scrap of tweed?

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

October 7, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Time Travel, Tom Cruise

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on the graphic novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
directed by Doug Liman

by Angelo Muredda Whatever one thinks of his weaselly insouciance as a performer, it’s hard to argue against Tom Cruise’s record of choosing solid collaborators to bring a certain kind of high-concept amuse-bouche to life. From Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, a derivative film about derivatives, to the more or less solid auteurist permutations of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the results have varied, but Cruise’s reputation as the sort of star who can get moderately interesting pulp bankrolled and realized by moderately interesting talents has deservedly persisted. So we arrive at Edge of Tomorrow, Doug Liman’s first kick at the Cruise can–a clever, fleetly-paced sci-fi riff on Groundhog Day with all the paradoxes of Duncan Jones’s structurally similar Source Code but a more playful demeanour.

TIFF ’14: 99 Homes

September 20, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Ramin Bahrani

by Angelo Muredda Where was there to go for Ramin Bahrani after the ghastly critical Americana of At Any Price–complete with race cars, ominous cornfields, and home movies–but a wildly over-cranked story about the housing crisis? Another silly, histrionic look at America Today, 99 Homes continues Bahrani's curious late run as the unaccomplished middlebrow answer to Nicholas Ray. It stays afloat where his last sank, though, largely thanks to some inspired scenery-gorging by the perpetually-vaping Michael Shannon, playing slick Rick Carver, a side-armed real estate broker who makes his bones seizing other Floridians' foreclosed houses and flipping them to the banks that probably shouldn't have given them a loan in the first place. Enter Andrew Garfield as working-class angel and struggling single-dad Dennis, who cedes his keys to the devil in the tan jacket only to go to work for him for a shot at getting his family home back. What are the odds he'll keep his house and, more importantly, his soul?

TIFF ’14: Phoenix

September 13, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF

***/****
directed by Christian Petzold

by Angelo Muredda A smart, tidy film about dumb people with messy histories, Christian Petzold's Phoenix walks the line between psychological thriller and earnest postwar allegory with grace when a little gangliness might have been nice. Petzold MVP Nina Hoss knocks it dead as Nelly, a Jewish Holocaust survivor betrayed by her wormy husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), left for dead, and now come back to life à la Franju, under a heavily-bandaged face. Instead of wanting revenge, Nelly yearns to recapture herself so that Johnny will recognize her as Nelly, opting to have her features restored to their original appearance as closely as possible. Never one to pay the most attention to detail (which is seemingly a satire of beefy husbands as much as it is of postwar German denial), Johnny welcomes back the reconstructed Nelly not as herself but as a woman who looks a lot like her, and who may just be the key to capturing his dead wife's inheritance, if she can play the part well enough.

TIFF ’14: Clouds of Sils Maria

September 8, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

***½/****
starring starring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz, Lars Eidinger
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Angelo Muredda A master class on acting played simultaneously to the orchestra and the cheap seats, Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria is an odd, beguiling thing. Juliette Binoche is Maria, an international star of film and theatre (naturally) on her way to accept an honorary award on behalf of the director and dramaturge who made her career when she was only eighteen in his infamous Maloja Snake, which sounds a lot like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by way of All About Eve. When he dies, Maria finds herself commissioned to star in a remake by a hotshot talent of the German stage, who sees her now as Helena, the older woman in the same-sex romantic drama, giving her role of the young seductress and abandoner Sigrid to rising starlet Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz). If that isn’t enough, the text–a younger man’s treatise on the loves and rivalries of women, as Maria has come to see it–has seemingly taken on a radioactive agency of its own, creeping into Maria’s hip-joined relationship with soulmate, line-runner, and personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart), who’s becoming yet another Sigrid at about the same pace Maria is settling into Helena’s skin.

TIFF ’14: Nightcrawler

September 6, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Bill Paxton
written and directed by Dan Gilroy

by Angelo Muredda What would we do without Jake Gyllenhaal, who's grounded every self-serious and thinly-sketched high-concept Movie About Something he's appeared in since Rendition at least? The committed star pulls off the same magic trick to even more impressive effect than usual with Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy's directorial debut after toiling away as a screenwriter on less pedigreed fare like Real Steel and Two for the Money as well as big brother Tony's most recent Bourne franchise effort. The Nightcrawler partisans–and they'll be numerous and vocal–will likely downplay such hacky origins along with the filial leg-up that producer Tony no doubt provided. (How many first-timers get to work with DP Robert Elswit?) But why should they when Gilroy's own film is about nothing so much as the corrosive effects crony capitalism wreaks on that heretofore-unsatirized American institution (certainly not covered more intelligently and presciently by a nearly forty-year-old film whose title rhymes with get work) of headline news?

Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

July 31, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Eileen Atkins, Colin Firth, Marcia Gay Harden, Hamish Linklater
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There's a scene late in Woody Allen's mostly forgotten You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger that briefly complicates its status as one of the prolific filmmaker's lighter doodles. Swept away by her feelings for her boss (Antonio Banderas), Naomi Watts's normally buttoned-up Sally takes a chance and confesses. In turn, she is swiftly rejected, and summarily dismissed as a partner, a colleague, and a person in one cruel wave of the arm. It's a scene Allen has indulged in before: he's always liked to see his onscreen women suffer a little, whether in Isaac's callous it's-not-me-it's-you dumping of Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) in Manhattan or the unceremonious jilting of poor Cecilia (Mia Farrow) in The Purple Rose of Cairo. But it's a sharp sting in a film as innocuous as Stranger, a reminder that for all the comforts of settling into his aesthetic of Windsor typeface and big-band music, Allen is not an especially warm filmmaker, not even in his comedies. Even with that in mind, his newest, Magic in the Moonlight, is an especially baffling thing–a dry, mean-spirited essay about that old romantic-comedy staple: the inevitability of death and decay.

Transcendence (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 28, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras D
starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jack Paglen
directed by Wally Pfister

by Angelo Muredda If his name wasn't already plastered over the ads for the nerd bona fides the studio hopes it will signal, you'd still know that Transcendence was the work of Wally Pfister from an inimitably-portentous opening shot featuring the long, steady fall of a raindrop: as meaningless a totem as Inception's ever-spinning (or is it wobbling?) top. Having lensed all but one of Christopher Nolan's joyless epics, including that "Twilight Zone" episode told with Miltonic gravitas, Pfister has at last graduated to making his own Nolan film about serious men making serious moral choices in the name of serious ideas–here, sending the first human consciousness up into the cloud to fuse with an artificially-intelligent program, the better to meddle in the affairs of mortals. The Pfister-Nolan collaboration was a fruitful one, the equivalent of a hammer repeatedly meeting its companion gong, but watching the alternately soapy and chilly Transcendence, one can't help but feel the cinematographer-turned-director would have been better served by a more conspicuous departure, a project that better indulged his more melodramatic instincts.

Boyhood (2014)

July 17, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda “I was somebody’s daughter, and then I was somebody’s fucking mother,” Patricia Arquette’s Olivia complains early on in Richard Linklater’s uncommonly rich, deceptively titled Boyhood. Though it’s been rightly celebrated for its guerrilla shoots and nomadic production history–depicting an adolescent’s maturation from six to eighteen by reassembling the cast once a year, more or less in secret, for a few days at a time–Boyhood might be most impressive as a reflection on the impossibility of fully capturing what happens in all those “and thens” that constitute a life. An impressionistic masterwork, Boyhood is arguably both Linklater’s most ambitious project and his most easygoing, revelling in the amorphousness of his conceit as well as the freedom it allows him to putter around in the unformed material of his characters’ still-unfolding lives.

Jersey Boys (2014)

June 19, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Musical, Theatrical

*/****
starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice
directed by Clint Eastwood

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

June 5, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

***/****
starring Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on the graphic novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
directed by Doug Liman

by Angelo Muredda Whatever one thinks of his weaselly insouciance as a performer, it's hard to argue against Tom Cruise's record of choosing solid collaborators to bring a certain kind of high-concept amuse-bouche to life. From Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion, a derivative film about derivatives, to the more or less solid auteurist permutations of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the results have varied, but Cruise's reputation as the sort of star who can get moderately interesting pulp bankrolled and realized by moderately interesting talents has deservedly persisted. So we arrive at Edge of Tomorrow, Doug Liman's first kick at the Cruise can–a clever, fleetly-paced sci-fi riff on Groundhog Day with all the paradoxes of Duncan Jones's structurally similar Source Code but a more playful demeanour.

Like Someone in Love (2012) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

June 2, 20142012, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Japan, The Criterion Collection

click any image to enlarge

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Rio Kase, Denden
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It's clear enough that Like Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it's harder to say at first what we're looking at and why. The closest voice we hear belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who's a little too preoccupied with lying her way out of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young revellers in front of her. Whether she's our lead takes a couple of false tries to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp directing his employees. Somewhere in-between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who's even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used to be after she's vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets back.

Hot Docs ’14: The Overnighters

May 5, 20142000s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2014

***/****
directed by Jesse Moss

by Angelo Muredda The intersection of the financial crisis and the North Dakota oil boom has turned Williston, ND into an unlikely mecca in the past few years. The influx of unemployed men who've left their homes for a new, thoroughly American, and probably-doomed shot at redemption on the oil fields is the subject of Jesse Moss's Sundance-feted The Overnighters, a complex look at how this mass exodus and uneasy resettlement has brought the residents of Williston to the limits of their compassion and brotherly love. The film focuses on the Herculean efforts of pastor Jay Reinke, who has turned his church into a makeshift home base for the new arrivals–to the chagrin of the facility's neighbours, who are skeptical about the men's scruffy appearance and possible criminal backgrounds, and the open hostility of the town newspaper, which wages war on Reinke's new congregation by publishing a list of former sex offenders harboured in the church as well as in the pastor's own home.

Hot Docs ’14: Joy of Man’s Desiring

May 4, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2014

Que ta joie demeure
***/****
directed by Denis Côté

by Angelo Muredda Although it's set in a factory rather than a zoo, Joy of Man's Desiring makes a fitting companion piece to Denis Côté's Bestiaire. Where the minimalist, formally austere Quebec filmmaker's previous documentary unfolded through a series of static frontal tableaux featuring animals displaced into some rather unnatural habitats, surrounded by bars and cages (the most extreme one being Côté's own mise-en-scène), his newest focuses on the alienated humans behind the machines that yield all manner of metal alloys, wood cases, and garments. Following an elfin worker's dramatic monologue about the nature of labour and human intimacy–she's played by an actress, the first of many instances where Côté throws a theatrical dirt bomb into the staid form of nonfiction–the symphonic title sequence sets the tone. It's a montage of self-propelling machines engaged in uncannily human dance moves, more unnerving still when considered in the context of some of the curiously mechanical human behaviour that follows, like when a worker loops around a cart full of boxes, elegantly dispensing a ream of Scotch tape as if he's wrapping a mummy.

Hot Docs ’14: Actress

May 2, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2014

***½/****
directed by Robert Greene

by Angelo Muredda "It wasn't just the character," Brandy Burre muses in voiceover as she watches herself in the kitchen in an artfully-framed dishwashing scene during the opening moments of Robert Greene's Actress: "It's me. I tend to break things." That's an appropriately wily introduction to a documentary that adroitly blends domestic melodrama, biography, and sociological study. "Brandy Burre is Actress," the surprisingly ostentatious (for nonfiction) title card announces, and so it goes: Burre stars as herself, a Master's-holding former supporting player from "The Wire" who took a break from acting after the birth of her first child, and who now seeks to get back in the game at a moment when her long-term relationship appears to be breaking apart like the dishware.