![]() ![]() I’ve never seen trauma depicted like it is in this World War II movie by Kantemir Balagov, as something that has left its characters feeling like aliens, trying to assimilate into an unwelcoming human population. The film is lush-looking, poisonously romantic, and intentionally untethered from any one decade within the 20th century. Martin Eden is a biting critique of capitalism and neoliberalism from the perspective of a bootstrapper: he’s a ferocious individualist who eventually achieves fame as a writer and sneers at the working class he clawed his way up from by intercutting his rise and fall with archival and faux-archival footage, Marcello manages to make his protagonist both an anti-hero and an Everyman. In return for his intervention, the kid’s family introduces him to an upper-crust existence that he instantly wants to join. Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli) begins Pietro Marcello’s film as a gorgeous naif, a sailor who bails out a rich kid in trouble at the docks. Its perfectly calibrated mixture of mischief and melancholy culminates in the most ecstatic ending of the year. It’s great fun to watch a bunch of upstanding citizens figure out they might be better at their jobs when they’re tipsy, but Another Round isn’t rosy about what it’s depicting either. It evades clichés about midlife crises thanks to a tremendously good performance from star Mads Mikkelsen, who plays a man who hasn’t acknowledged the depression he’s been shouldering for years. The drinking isn’t the point here: Thomas Vinterberg’s film is about the panic of feeling your horizons narrow and your passions ebb away as you get older. )Īnother Round follows a group of middle-aged Danish friends, all teachers at the local high school, who in the name of science (or something) embark on an experiment in microdosing with alcohol that soon escalates into being shitfaced at work. Relic asks whether battling a nightmarish ghoul may be simpler than dealing with the realities of dementia, but it isn’t an allegory it’s a movie in which regular and supernatural nightmares coexist, a balancing act that’s never more impressive than in its final, audacious turn. But the once-familiar space turns warped and menacing over the course of the film, as does Edna herself, as Kay tries to figure out if what’s ailing her parent has to do with the older woman’s deteriorating mental state - or something darker, like possession. The house in question is the one in which Melbourne divorcée Kay (Emily Mortimer) grew up - and to which she returns, with her own daughter in tow, to check on her mother, Edna (Robyn Nevin), who’s been staying alone there for years. Natalie Erika James’s debut is both a haunted-house story and a heartbreaking drama about the dilemma posed by a fiercely independent loved one who’s no longer able to keep living alone. Until then, Vulture’s three film critics are celebrating the greatest hits of our pandemic year, as best they can. These long pandemic months of staying inside, staring at the same virtual window for everything, has just made us understand how much supposed convenience we’d happily trade for the chance to surrender to a viewing experience in the dark, with other people, all of us watching together. And while we saw most of these movies at home, we would have loved even more to see them on a big screen. A “great time” is not a thing one has in 2020. We can’t say that we had a great time at the movies this year. The other is that movies still, in many ways, need movie theaters, lest they sink into the all-consuming swamp that is content online, failing to raise the attention of its intended audience - or any audience, really. One is that, with just about everything consigned to a streaming or on-demand release, there was an incredible bounty of films this year - smaller films, in some cases, but certainly more diverse in style, tone, subject matter, story, and origin. Then, in 2020, when the theaters shut down and the films came out online, many of those same people wondered, “Hey, what happened to all the movies?” We live in a world of many truths. “Who needs movie theaters?” they wondered. ![]() “Why don’t all movies just come out online?” they asked in those B.C. Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Photos by Courtesy of Netflix Courtesy of Kino Lorber Victor Jucá Amazon Prime Video ![]() From a Spike Lee joint on Netflix to a Steve McQueen anthology on Prime Video and everything in between.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |