What Lies Beneath: The Films of Robert Zemeckis
Zemeckis' lesser known films provide a context for the director’s consistent style—as well as that style's consistent variability.
Sicario
The film's border setting acts as a suitable metaphor: the War on Drugs transgresses boundaries not only physical but also moral, and the audience feels the weight of these transgressions with every passing minute.
Animated Streaming Pick: Chico & Rita
For the first in a series of Animated Streaming Picks, Kyle Johnson reviews Francisco Trueba's visually and sonically resplendent jazz romance.
NYFF 2015: Everything is Copy
Because the tone and content of her writing were so personal, Ephron’s success paradoxically depended on her carefully curated public image. While everything is copy, it’s only copy when she wants it to be, and her power lies in that distinction between open and secret.
NYFF 2015: In the Shadow of Women
With each narrative reveal, one gets the creeping sense that Pierre, too, by virtue of his very infidelity, his childish behavior, his destructive impulses, lives in the shadow of the woman he’s betraying.
NYFF 2015: Mountains May Depart
Jia doesn’t leave the character of China's transformations to the audience's imagination. Tao’s son is given the name Dollar. “I will make you lots of money,” his dad whispers to the child.
NYFF 2015: Blow Out
Straddling thresholds of genre, style, and class, Blow Out challenges the seemingly dichotomous relationship between popular low-budget movies and esoteric Hollywood films.
NYFF 2015: The Boys From Fengkuei
The lengthiest shots in the film focus primarily on individuals—characters in between actions, just sitting, thinking, staring off into the distance, wholly preoccupied with that primary adolescent pastime of brooding.
NYFF 2015: Baumbach Charts New Territory In a Well-Worn Genre
It’s like gawking at Whistler’s Mother in the Mussée D’Orsay while Whistler himself stands over your shoulder and talks to you about it.
Summer Views: Rem Berger
It is extremely engaging to witness Brian’s descent into madness and his recovery from it side by side. The pacing is excellent—although the film builds towards two separate climaxes, they seemingly progress as one.
NYFF 2015: 4 Takes on Nathaniel Dorsky / Jerome Hiler
Dorsky and Hiler know the value of absence, of dark space—the film artist’s equivalent of the painter’s blank canvas, or the writer’s blank page.
NYFF 2015: Black Girl
The bulk of the film makes us beg as she does for something to alleviate what, after just twenty minutes of interior shots of the French apartment, can feel like an endless entrapment.
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