It’s been a long time since Cate Blanchett got weird. She’s played unlikeable, she’s played dark, she’s played strange, but not since Heaven in 2002, in which German director Tom Tykwer got her to shave her head and bomb the Italian police, has Cate Blanchett got weird. But Cate Blanchett is also one of the very rare actors in …
The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med Nålen) is based on such a well-known criminal case in Denmark that mentioning the name of one of the characters is a local spoiler. For the rest of us, the horror must unspool the old-fashioned way as we watch a young woman’s truly desperate …
There’s nothing like a sudden death to bring a community together, and there’s nothing like a tragedy to make people realize what’s truly important. This Icelandic movie, When the Light Breaks (Ljósbrot), is about the worst 24 hours in the lives of a group of young friends because, in the course …
In the horrible post-apocalyptic future depicted in the Mad Max movies, where people have names like The Octoboss and Toast the Knowing, it was downright revolutionary of Mad Max’s mother to name him Max. In Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, two of the evil sidekicks are named Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and, what …
Quentin Dupieux, the director of The Second Act (Le deuxième acte), who was also the writer, cinematographer, and editor of The Second Act, thanks his own brain in the credits. This is entirely what should be expected from Mr. Dupieux, whose works are – and this is meant as an extreme compliment – completely insane. He tends to work …
How do you illustrate for the screen a life lived with physical limitations? You illustrate the life of the mind. In this biopic of writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke), the inventor of the ‘southern Gothic’ genre of literature, director Ethan Hawke (also the producer, co-writer, and Ms. Hawke’s father) chose to enact sequences from …
It might be a little much to claim that Ryan Gosling is singlehandedly reinventing American masculinity onscreen. On the other hand, he has followed up his global triumph in Barbie (and winning of the Oscar in all our hearts with his performance of I’m Just Ken at the Academy Awards) with The Fall Guy, during which he …
She grows marrows, not swedes. Marrows are a kind of zucchini, which in the UK is known by its French name, courgette, while a swede is called a rutabaga when it’s in the US. But her name is indeed Caroline, and we all know a good vegetable-based pun when we …
Dev Patel exploded into global consciousness in Slumdog Millionaire, the 2008 British smash hit that opened the Western world’s eyes to the cinematic possibilities within India. Since then, Mr. Patel’s roles have largely been in Western films with an Indian setting – the two Marigold Hotel movies, the biopic Lion, and a few thrillers. But even in …
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a British movie set at the seaside will be incredibly depressing, and on the surface, Silver Haze is another one of them. It’s done in the usual no-budget British style saved for working-class stories – handheld cameras following screaming families of dubious income smoking endless …
The Scottish comedian Janey Godley is from Glasgow, so of course a new documentary about her life would be the closing gala of the Glasgow Film Festival. But when a person’s life has been as troubled as Ms. Godley’s, a documentary needs to address those troubles directly instead of letting circumstances do the …
The G, from writer-director Karl R. Hearne, is an unusual crime thriller in that its central character is a woman in her sixties and the insults of aging are central to the crimes at its core. But the unusual intelligence of The G is that it knows that physical weakness means little if …