Another topical misfire from a director who, like Martin Scorsese, is proving that big budgets, stars who rob the premises of dramatic persuasion and the director's not altogether profound or novel understanding of History will not advance the form. P.T. Anderson used to be the rare American director with literary imagination and a good ear, but he might do better now seeking out other literary properties, and leave Thomas Pynchon's excursions to the page, where they tiresomely belong. This might even require seeking material outside Hollywood -- terrifying as the thought may be.
Don't believe the critics. A saccharine trifle. It's only reality is othe (and far superior) movies. And so unserious are the conventions here that murder itself is insufficient to inconvenience a happy ending. This is what happens when the only reality is movies and you don't respect the better ones. And what a pity to see that firebrand of a leading lady, who's the only reason to sit through this one, as a drone of domestic happiness when anyone who's seen a film noir knows how it's supposed to end.
It begins with great promise: a white student college objecting to a Flannery O'Connor title in a course on southern literature and the Black instructor, a literary novelist with no interest in identity politics or the "Black experience", pointedly points out that if he can live with it, so can she. Which lands him on unpaid leave -- and what follows becomes the sort of movie this guy would actually despise, with ludicrous racial stereotypes (moronic white people), operatic dramatic cliches (the gay brother, the mom with Alzheimer's, the faithful servant, the kind-hearted cop, etc.) and only the briefest contempt for the Soulful Minority Person hawking racial consciousness in the Alice Walker/Maya Angelou/Ava DuVernay mold. But of course a movie contemptuous of all that could never get made.
A strange, frustrating hybrid, lacking sustained focus. The story might have been more effectively told from the point of view of the Osage, but today that would be impossible: charges of appropriation and racism would be sure to follow. The movie does have the rare virtue of finally casting Leo DiCaprio in a role which suits him, as a dim-witted good old boy who actually does love, in his puny inconsistent way, the wife he's systematically poisoning on his uncle's instructions. DeNiro is, unfortunately, a distraction. The movie itself offered better choices for the role.
Another movie made by persons whose only reality is other movies and what's on TV. Todd Haynes, years ago, exhausted his semiotics degree on "Safe", and Bunuel had already done that movie with far more wit, mystery and indirection in the 1960s. Literary imagination slunk out of the building, carrying an Aeropress and a cardboard box.....
American indie film hits 60, and hasn't improved with age. The mystery is why the writer/director regards characters with the minds and vocabularies of sitcom personnel (It's going to be amazing! Oh, wow!) as worth the satire, or if she actually think they're interesting. Send the lot of them to Amazon warehouse jobs for a month or two. The writer/director might also want to try it.
One of dozens of Schrader's films seeking redemption -- but of Schrader himself, working in the shadow of Bresson, with only a show of the rigor and formalism needed to pull it off. His peculiar men, Hollywood flagellants with impossible manias, are all of the same construction, faithless obsessives. None carries the religious conviction to allow the trick to work, nor does the filmmaker himself. The cost of a world without god is you can't use the guy for drama any longer.
The director's love affair is not with the movies but with himself, grounded in an unfounded confidence in his abilities as director, writer, comic and historian. The anachronistic music, language and (of course) minority casting leaves no self-indulgence or approbation unexploited. Whoever paid for this mess must have been as tiresomely arch, antic and dim as the studio executives who appear in the movie.
Limp, over-long, constantly jumping the shark (the sum of the movie) and of too little interest to satisfy the claims it makes for itself. Race is nowhere near as interesting as some people seem to think.
Obscenely eager to endear, even as the camera never stops admiring the insufferably glib and wholly unbelievable protagonist, who also happens to be the writer, director and producer. The best you can say of this one is that it's all of a piece, performance, music, writing, camera, on the twee road to perdition. Sundance at its absolute worst.
Has a few moments of interest, but **** had made this movie he'd be vilified as a woman-hating troll who regards motherhood as a source of life-long ill-humor, doll-pilfering and suicidal slumbering at water's edge. This may be the Aegean, but folks still drown in it. The pregnant mafiosa from Queens might have made for an interesting 2 hours, if the filmmaker was prepared to forgo W.B. Yeats and the life of the mind in favor of something vulgar, entertaining, and fast-moving. You know, like a movie? I mean, like, what if it really isn't the case that movie-stars know more than the rest of us?
A movie about infantile adults, made for other infantile adults. If this is modern being and "parenting", complete with mic and recorder -- everyone's an artist! -- the future will be worse than anyone in this movie (the question is frequently asked) could hope to guess. It's enough to make any decent person look with admiration at American rednecks.
Autobiography and whimsy are the last refuge of imaginative bankruptcy? This defanged Fellini family history is pleasant enough, but "distraction" (see the movie, you'll understand) is about the best one could say for it.
A trifle too pleased with itself. The usual movie review hyperboles aside, why are the critics cheering? Because it's effortless, easier to like than Reynolds or Daniel **** clipping nostril hairs or Lancaster Dodd downing jet fuel, hair tonic and lime? What was the master thinking?
Another middle-brow literary adaptation from James Schamus, the writer of a number of equally unnecessary Ang Lee pictures and the producer of even more of them. It's Cliff Notes, with great art direction, for people who don't read and can't bear mystery. A tasteful nonentity like this one was made to order for reviewers who have to come up with 5 masterpieces a week, but why these movies are necessary in the face of a book which gives a perfectly adequate account of itself goes unexplained.
