Filmmakers who make movies about the Second World War often do so mainly with high-stakes metaphors in mind. Malick’s new film illustrates the need for a de-Nazification of the cinema.
The film, made by the Safdie brothers, jitters and skitters and lurches and hurtles with the desperate energy of its main character, played by Adam Sandler.
The very romance of memory and the beautiful melancholy of love and separation are built into the substance of the film, about a painter and her subject.
Martin Scorsese has composed the film to reward repeated viewings—and, for that matter, to reward the kind of closeup, hands-on intimacy that laptop-watching affords.
In Marielle Heller’s film, Rogers comes off as a sage, a virtual philosopher with a tone appropriate for children but with ideas of a revelatory depth for all ages.
Though based on a true story and rooted in the quasi-documentary details of auto racing, the film’s franchise-like tailoring of emotion and action turns it empty and hollow.
Canny and intricate, it’s Noah Baumbach’s most developed and original film. But the director doesn’t risk breaking his own frames to acknowledge the offscreen dramas, the lives behind the characters, and what his movie implies for them.
