Pictureland

The camelhair coat worn by Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) shines as brilliantly as anything seen in J.C. Chador's A Most Violent Year.  The coat is merely the golden tan of most such garments.  The New York of A Most Violent Year - interior and exterior - pales by comparison.  It's 1981, and a most violent year indeed in and around the great metropolis.  Almost none of  filth of Abel's world - the fuel oil of his business, the frowning elements, dirt kicked up by a vehicle chase - seem to adhere to the impeccable coat.  But as he tries to make a major expansion of his business while attempting to fend off the grip and violence of gangsterism one one side and encroaching law enforcment on the other, the poised, well dressed man is sorely pressed to keep himself clean in the most profound of respects. A Most Violent Year is a sprawling American story told revealing small.  The canvas is certainly large, even if spread with muted color.  Much...

Young Megan Charpentier, after her first look at the script for Andres Muschietti's   Mama. Mama mia!  Is there no end to the suffering that will result from bank deregulation?  How many lives have been affected for the worse?  How many national economies thrown into chaos?  How many men  driven to shoot financial firm partners, do the same to their estranged wives, drag their confused children on strange odysseys that culminate in gangly shape-shifting 19th-century ghosts wringing their sorry necks before playing mother to those increasingly feral children for five years, the poor waifs subsisting on a diet mainly of cherries?  How many?!!   Well, as for that last scenario, I feel safe in proclaiming the answer to be an unambiguous one, and that courtesy of the operatically silly Mama from writer and director Andres Muschietti. Most of the above takes place before the opening titles arrive in Mama.  Then it's five years hence from the...

It's so much easier to see the glory of war from a distance.  From many thousands of miles away or the remove of decades.  So much easier then to speak of greatest generations and by implication the glory of their efforts.  A fairly prominent New York critic has praised Zero Dark Thirty for so thoroughly showing the dark side of war.  As if there were any other side.  Of course, any war will have its varied experiences, its moments of bizarre juxtaposition, its examples of bravery.  But it's a grim, inhumane business. Zero Dark Thirty , written by Mark Boal and directed with brilliant assurance by Kathryn Bigelow, takes us right into the dark heart of the action.  The war in question, in the rather Orwellian Newspeak of the previous (and present) administration, is the "war on terror."  At times this action is quite slow, the following of leads and suspects over many years, the interminable wait to make decisive moves.  At other key ...

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...

Life, the universe and everything.   It's tempting to appropriate the title of the third of Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker" novels toward the end of finding something big enough to do justice to Terrence Malick's fifth feature, The Tree of Life .  Of course, Adams' titles and books were full of whimsy and irony.   Both the great strength and dragging limitation of The Tree of Life is its absolute sincerity.   Apparently first conceived as film called Q after his great Days of Heaven , this latest film from the writer/director is at least partially the fruition of that ambitious origins of life on Earth project.   For good and bad, The Tree of Life has the look and bursting at the seams feel of something that has been worked on and worked over for decades. There is here all one usually finds in Malick.  There is the spare dialog which occurs often in the form of whispery statements, an evolution from the relatively conventional female voice-overs in...