“Shame” is about Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a sex addict whose ill-kept personal life takes a downturn when his volatile and damaged sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) visits. If you read this review just for the plot, then feel free to move on to the next section, for that is really all there is to it. Yet even with this simple premise, “Shame” haunted me for a week. It clutches on quietly, converting reality into lavish long shots and close-ups that brim the bold, powerful feature.
Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. They fall in love. They face obstacles. They overcome these obstacles to reach their happy ending.
In its very first shot, Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” sucks you into a magical, wonderful new world and refuses to let you go. The camera pans over the 1930’s Parisian skyline, but this is not the “real” Paris; it is the enchanted city of lights and love that Americans have been so fond of imagining for decades now (we saw it most recently in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”).
John Edgar Hoover took over the post of Director of the Bureau of Investigations in 1924 (they wouldn’t add the “Federal” until 1935), when an Amherst graduate sat in the White House, the Chicago Cubs hadn’t won a World Series in 18 years and race riots, union strikes and anarchist bombings made Occupy Wall Street look like child’s play. Hoover would remain in his office until the day he died 48 years later, when Tricky Dick ticked off entries on his enemies list, the Vietnam War just kept raging and the Chicago Cubs hadn’t won a World Series in 66 years.
Halloween and horror movies go together like Will Smith and the Fourth of July: it just feels wrong to have one without the other. There’s nothing to send the chills down your spine like turning out all the lights and curling up with your favorite frightful flick in anticipation of a sleepless night (and you will not be able to blame that midterm this time).
Warm, sentimental and funny, “Midnight In Paris” beautifully explores the clash of nostalgia and reality among fantastical encounters. Director Woody Allen takes us on an exquisite journey through time, spanning across the present, the 1890s and the 1920s — in the City of Light that reeks of wine, music, poignancy and genius, while effortlessly depicting conflicts inherent in the human nature. Only with such grace can the movie truly do Paris justice, and Allen doubtlessly did that, regardless of the extra crème layer on top.
The day has finally come. One of cinema’s most esoteric, obtuse-sounding pairings has finally been realized. “Drive,” the new film from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, deftly blends two dissimilar cinematic worlds: those of the art and action film. In its sensibilities, it’s at one with any of the most popular art films to come out of Europe in the past 10 years. And yet, particularly in the later half, it adopts a distinctly 70s action crime film vibe. It’s about as strange a pairing as can be found in film; it’s unlike anything I have ever seen before.
