And the world began.” That opening stanza in Theo Anthony’s remarkable nonfiction endeavor “ Rat Film” sets the stage for a movie that brilliantly defies categorization. The rat nibbled the egg and let the light in. “Before the world became the world, it was an egg. Both formally ambitious and emotionally accessible, the movie transforms its main stunt into a savvy dose of minimalism with existential possibilities that cut deep. From the horrors of gentrification and urban development to the pithy obsessions that distract from deeper truths, “A Ghost Story” offers bountiful themes. Lowery has quickly developed a filmography that mines for awe in solitude, and here delivers a cosmic variation on that theme, exploring the ineffable relationship between people and the meaning they give to the places that have value in their lives. Yet writer-director David Lowery channels the absurdity of this setup into an extraordinary mood piece that amounts to his best movie yet. The main special effect in “ A Ghost Story” is older than the movies: After a young Dallas musician (Casey Affleck) dies in a car crash, he returns as a ghost to the home he shared with his wife (Rooney Mara), and he’s draped in a sheet with hastily cutout eyeholes, like some misbegotten Halloween costume.
The duo’s collaborative project finds them roaming the French countryside, unearthing the lives of ordinary people and celebrating their virtues.
J.R.’s actually a brilliant photographer whose large-scale images bring marginalized faces to the foreground, a motif that has resonated for Varda ever since her working-class portrait “La Pointe Courte” in 1959. But as “Faces Places” makes clear throughout, appearances can be deceiving. of the French New Wave delivers another wondrous late-period essay film, this time in collaboration with photographer J.R., a sunglasses-clad photographer whose style is such an obvious Jean-Luc Godard rip-off that Madame Varda calls him on it. Stewart’s inscrutable face is the engine that brings this enigmatic wonder to life. But the movie’s also an elegant embodiment of one woman’s attempt to move beyond her deepest sorrows, and it’s rich with ambiguous clues to her emotional state. In one of the best suspense sequences in modern memory, Assayas uses the ephemera of modern communication to show just how much personal devices can become the stuff of solipsistic nightmares: “Alive or dead?” Stewart’s character texts back to her unknown stalker, riding a train in silence, and the ellipsis leading up to the reply is the essence of 21st-century terror. This is a measured, richly ambiguous work about the subjective process of grief - masquerading as a ghost story - that experiments with the minutiae of film language as only a master of the medium can do.
NYTIMES BEST MOVIES 2017 SERIES
As Maureen, a young American living in Paris and coping with the recent death of her twin brother, the actress carries every scene through a series of peculiar circumstances that may or may not involve supernatural phenomena. In Olivier Assayas’ “Clouds of Sils Maria,” Kristen Stewart was a supporting character in their latest collaboration, she’s the center of the show. It’s a delicate reminder that even the simple pleasures of life stem from philosophical convictions. The result is at once hypnotic and charming, a movie with the capacity to elicit both the OMG-level effusiveness of internet memes and existential insights. “Kedi” isolates the profound relationship between man and cat by exploring it across several adorable cases in a city dense with examples. Cat lovers may be content with a mashup of feline faces bounding around the city, but hell, YouTube’s got that covered.
0 kommentar(er)
