Don’t have a particularly piquant reason for catching up with this film at this moment in time, although I am moving to upstate New York later this month, and perhaps no film I can think of evokes the wintry, wilted spirit of that location, at least as it exists in the mind, so there is a certain poetic coincidence in this review.
How rare is it that a film genuinely empathizes with its characters without sweeping them up into the torrential currents of white-water narrative or turning them into pawns in a chessboard game of improvement, actualization, and goal-achievement? Without implicit edicts that their lives are only worth filming if they are in the middle of a personal quest for fulfillment or at the bank to establish a new lease on life? Kenneth Lonergan’s third directorial effort Manchester-by-the-Sea is one, and his debut You Can Count on Me is another, even greater achievement.
Every Lonergan character is a gift to their performer and to humanity, and this film’s two central gifts are adult siblings Sammy Prescott (Laura Linney) and Terry Prescott (Mark Ruffalo). In the opening scene, a glimpse of their childhood, their parents are killed in a car accident which Lonergan writes and films as a humanistically, animatedly tedious drive-time conversation rather than relying on clever presentiments of the impending tragedy or noir-infused, gravid imagery. In this film thoroughly free of portent or signposting, a few splintered shards – the police officer knocks on the family door and the kids answer, a pastor speaks at a funeral underneath a child’s choir – are enough for Lonergan to establish a sense of consequence that is born, piquantly, out of the ordinary, rather than through a tendentiously dramatic visual or narrative schema that raises these characters or their tragedy on a pedestal or anoints them as totems to The Truth, ambassadors to middle-America and suburban life. Continue reading
Ouija: Origin of Evil
More traditional and individualistic – almost fiercely so – in comparison to Steven Soderbergh’s more heterogeneous panoplies of varying voices, textures, and tones, Erin Brockovich doesn’t always do more than glisten, but boy does it. It’s pure pop, and it’s easy to criticize Soderbergh for heading in that direction after the more experimental (and better) The Limey. But no modern filmmaker oscillates between his experimental personal projects and his only-slightly-less-personal commercial properties with Soderbergh’s frequency or his gusto, let alone his singular ability to thin the membrane between private experiment and populist fare so thin that there often isn’t a difference between the two. (Consider the exhaustive meta-textual star-commentary and celebrity hang-out anti-caper film Ocean’s Twelve). Who can blame him for making Erin Brockovich when a fanatically experimental and alienating film like Full Frontal is right around the corner? Or, for that matter, who can blame him when his feather-light pop nothings like Erin Brockovich are this wonderful? 
A wonderfully low-wattage, free-verse odyssey and a quiet parody and embracement of classical mythopoetic adventures, King of the Hill’s structure lacks the jostled tempo of director Steven Soderbergh’s more revolutionary films, but inconsequentiality, here, is where the heart lies. A tapestry of repetitions and minute improvements in identity and possibility, King of the Hill is a bildungsroman of a more everyday sort than a classical Greek tragedy. The adventurer in this case is Aaron Kurlander (Jesse Bradford), an eighth grader in Depression-era Saint Louis whose mother (Lisa Eichhorn) is in a sanitarium for an unspecified disease, whose father (Keroen Krabbe) is a travelling watch salesman who goes on long trips to Kansas and Iowa, and whose younger brother has been shipped away to live with his extended family so his parents can save on money. 
This review is based on both parts of Soderbergh’s film taken as a whole. 
A mercurial exercise in pure cinematic economy, a gangster tale cut-up and reinterpreted through director Steven Soderbergh’s shattered-glass editing, The Limey is Point Blank dressed up as Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Actually, that’s dismissive. The Limey doesn’t don the exterior garb of a modernistically scrambled study in memory. Soderbergh’s film feels modernism down to its very core. It cracks into pieces before our eyes, and in protagonist Wilson’s mind. Played by Terrence Stamp in the performance of his life, Wilson is the lightning-rod around which Soderbergh’s coiled energy and recklessly frazzled editing anti-rhythms commune. 
Logan Lucky, the comeback film of the formerly-but-not-really-retired Steven Soderbergh, is out this month, and the return to cinema of one of the great filmmakers of the past quarter-century is obviously something to celebrate. I’ll do so with a few reviews, the only way I know how. 
The Dark Tower is surely the biggest budgeted Stephen King adaptation thus far, releasing after a relatively long-lull since the King cinematic-adaptation factory downsized about a decade ago. With It primed to make a boatload at the box office in little more than a month, let’s take a look at a few of King’s most notable film adaptations, diamonds in a truly rough slog of visual atrocity. 
Misery
There’s a fundamentally volatile, empathically compelling core about Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, more akin to an over-budgeted experiential art film than what might pass as a narrative in the conventional sense, especially for summer blockbusters and their perennial fetish for stories of self-actualization. In Dunkirk, characters are ciphers, stripped of anything resembling backstory. They are defined only by the minutiae of how they react to peril of the moment. Nolan strives not to detail, from above, the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers after the failed British invasion of German-occupied France during WWII. Instead, he works over-time to feverishly emblazon the past in highly subjective, ground-level cinematic strokes. An experiment in the moment, in an eternal present-tense, Dunkirk is a stark refutation (within blockbuster confines) of the tendentiousness of narrative where moments are primarily valuable for the pay-offs and catharsis they will lead to in a theoretical future. 
The Long Take 