Dheepan
“She’s your responsibility, understand?” Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) The TAXI DRIVER-esque bloodbath climax will divide audiences; but director Jacques Audiard understands cinema, and 100 minutes of simmering violence needs a release. Some filmmakers would have let that tension dissipate, Audiard on the other hand appreciates prestige drama gets an energy injection and a refreshing spin if genre tropes are admixed. A PROPHET, arguably his most famous work, benefitted from the SCARFACE trajectory, arriving at the same time as ‘Breaking Bad’. Immigrant stories tend to fall into categories of the dour, the uplifting or the escapist; maybe the creative team thought: What if those lines are cut across? [To read more, click here.] |
Midnight Special
“I like worrying about you,” Roy (Michael Shannon) When a modern filmmaker wants to channel their inner early-Steven Spielberg, they can make a film as entertaining as SUPER 8. This is unfortunately not the case here. Director Jeff Nichols has been crafting intimate works of family dysfunction and crime (SHOTGUN STORIES, MUD) even when the themes have occasionally been grandiose (TAKE SHELTER). While the latter needed a climax of ambiguity, instead of a money shot, he has previously not really put a foot wrong. [To read more, click here.] |