Pictureland

No, it's not that film.  Not a Road Warrior for a new generation, a new century.   The Rover is set amid the seared, forbidding landscape of Australia's Outback.  The time is post-something - maybe not post- apocalypse, but post-"collapse."  There is violence.  There are vehicles and pursuit.  There is at the story's center a man whom one might well characterize as a road warrior, though for what he so single-mindedly fights besides the return of his automobile, one is hard pressed to determine for most of the film's duration.  And yet.... Ply as it might the lonely roads of nether Australia, David Michod's The Rover confines itself to a very small emotional map.  So too that grim fellow in the short pants and dress shirt, both long absent from the wash, hell bent to recover his car.  All the more impressive that The Rover so involves us in its story, it's anti-hero's almost inexplicable quest, wrings so much emotion out of such a ...

Shoot, Forrest, shoot!  The imposing Tom Hardy as Forrest Bondurant in Lawless. Those merry Australian lads - director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave - are back.  And yes, there will be blood. Hillcoat and Cave collaborated quite impressively on The Proposition (2005), which plays like a combination of Greek tragedy and violent revenge Western , set in the aptly forbidding setting - time as well as dusty space - of 1880's Australia.  Cave, usually occupied singing his cheery songs as the leader of The Bad Seeds and Grinderman, also wrote and acted in Hillcoat's first full-length feature, Ghosts...of the Civil Dead (1988). While Lawless does   depict a sanguinary conflict between a resolutely independent family of moonshiners and corrupt law enforcement representatives, it might well have seemed a colorful lark to Hillcoat, whose last project was a grim adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2009). For the film at hand, Cave has adapted the...

“The family has been reduced to the lowest of creatures – we’ve become actors.”  A sad state of affairs indeed, as pronounced by the King of England, George V (Michael Gambon), to his son, Albert (Colin Firth).   The realization proves troubling in more ways than one to the stammering Duke of York .     The advent of "the wireless," as radio was so quaintly known, meant that it was no longer enough for a monarch or his family to simply look the part and occasionally vouchsafe one of those swively, restrained wave to the masses.   A king or queen would have to speak, ingratiate him or herself to their subjects in their homes, their pubs, their places of work.  This meant that the Duke of York, paralyzed by that stammer since childhood, would be forced into the acting, the theater of public life.    Even worse, the relative safety on which he was counting, playing understudy to his brother, David (as ever, members of the royal famil...