“How can you tell she’s an alien?” asks Don (Aidan Delbis, an impressive neuro-divergent actor) of his cousin Teddy (the excellent Jesse Plemons).
Given that the film industry is a fairly vain business, it follows that every movie is to some extent a vanity project. So it seems churlish to describe this new Daniel Day-Lewis picture, which he co-wrote with his son, Ronan, for Ronan to direct and himself to star in, as other than a welcome return for the superman actor.
What defines a life? Money and success? Happiness? Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams employs a narrator, much as Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven did, who fields big questions like those while drawing the audience in. Bentley’s voice is an omniscient one, its owner unseen.
Directed by Lynne Ramsay and based on the book by Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love is an unsettling dive into the disturbed psyche of Grace, played with mercurial brilliance by Jennifer Lawrence. Grace is a new mother still struggling to get accustomed to the demands of her baby, and with her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson), she has moved into the house that belonged to Jackson’s dead uncle, out in the remote backwoods of Montana.
Kelly Reichardt has a thing about losers. You often see them in her films. It's the failure of American individualism that concerns her.
Wendy and Lucy is a road movie with a protagonist who’s unable to move on, and a study of friendship where one half of the partnership is mostly absent from the screen. Originally released during the 2008 financial crisis, Kelly Reichardt’s third feature film is ripe for reissue, its depiction of life on society’s margins more relevant than ever.
The clatter of cool jazz on the soundtrack announces writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s latest project, the kind of score that back in the day would have announced a film by a maverick new talent. The film, her ninth, has been given a faded and vintage look, tricked out in shades of greige and tan that you see in ageing photos of the 1970s, as if it too was shot then.
There’s something about hauntingly performed songs written in the first person that can draw us in like nothing else. As songs from Robert Johnson to Leonard Cohen remind us, they can take us into the mental recesses of their subjects – for instance, malcontents and killers – better even than a novel or a movie. We’re kidnapped by the voice.
Another day, another shooting: this is Florida, USA, where the "Stand Your Ground" self-defence law allows people to use lethal force when they perceive a threat to their lives. The idea may be shocking to Britons, but such laws have become prevalent in America, even though they may be providing cover for straight-up murder.
From its opening scene, Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows,1938) feels like a reverie, a period of sustained waiting, during which the characters stand at a threshold knowing that a tragedy will occur if they cross it.