It’s all rather stunning to behold, especially in black & white, but Below the Clouds eloquently articulates the maxim that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That eye sees something very different from a safe remove. By and large, the people featured in Rosi’s documentary are in the path of danger.
There are flashes of greatness, especially when Gyllenhaal and cinematographer Lawrence Sher capture some of the film’s wilder set-pieces. But then the narrative messiness undercuts the beauty of those images.
It becomes a warm and insightful tribute to every kid that finds peace climbing up a tree, to every adult that realizes the value of the natural world, and to the ties that bind us to the world around us. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn what a keystone species is.
The influence of the original Mad Max is undeniable – not the crazy biker bits, but the sense of a collapsing world, of the personal impacts and damage inflicted by the end of everything.
Mesa Soto initially mines wry humor from Oscar’s sad-sackness; he and editor Ricardo Saravia are especially good at scene transitions that land like a punchline, and the marvelous Rios – small of stature and existentially slumped – cuts a comical figure. But the film, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes last year, subtly evolves (more successfully than Oscar, it turns out) to find just as much to scorn in the poetry center elites, and to nudge the viewer toward a more compassionate approach to its luckless sorta-hero.
Onscreen, Lighton explores the imbalance between the two and gently leads the audience with sympathy and empathy to a perfect resolution that asks both to face their own dysfunction.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie may not win over many or even any new fans, but devotees of the TV show, and even diehards from the single-n Nirvana web days will relish having their favorite gentle idiots back and hearing the same joke on a bigger stage.
A shaggy lead actor, a mundane setting given sci-fi spice, and a quick rattling off of the film’s central pitch – Rockwell’s Man From the Future needs six people to come with him to save the world – all fulfill the Fantastic-Fest catnip check list. Yet that intense energy can’t sustain the movie’s two-hour runtime, even with charismatic infusions from the star-studded supporting cast.
