If art is truly to be unique and great then it can’t be easily reproducible. If every frame of At Eternity’s Gate, a film about Vincent Van Gough directed by Julian Schnabel, is striving to be a reproduction of VVG’s …
Category: 2018 movies
“Border”: Rising Above the Tragedy of Chromosomes
Border is a caveman fairy tale, a love story about chromosomes gone wrong, a metaphor about how man can rise and fall to his simian origins. It never settles into an evolution of its own, always evolving into different passions, …
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“Burning”: Lee Chang-Dong Searches for the Fiery Great Hunger of Existence
Burning refers to both physical and inner emotional fires. The Korean director Lee Chang-Dong delights in taking his movie, an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story, right up to the edge of borders physical (the blare of a North Korean …
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“Shoplifters”: Kore-Eda’s Great Haiku of Family and Light
Hirokazu Kore-Eda Shoplifters has the economy and emotional power of a Haiku. Scenes run the exact length they need to be. There is not an extra syllable, an extra frame, an extra color or ray of light, no unneeded image, …
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“They Shall Not Grow Old”: Digging Into The Grit, The Horror of WWI
In They Shall Not Grow Old, a WWI documentary directed by Peter Jackson to commemorate its 100 year end, it’s the work a day attitude of the British soldiers as archived on BBC audio records that stands out. For most …
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“We the Animals”: Portrait of the Wild Young Artist
In We the Animals, Jonah’s (Evan Rosado) words in his journal are blurred while the overlaid furiously scribbled art is vividly animated. The director Jeremiah Zagar is showing the congealing of a young artistic mind and vision defining its place …
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“Lizzie”: Gets to the Lessie Behind the Whack Job
In the real courtroom Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murdering her parents but in the court of public opinion and mythic imagination she would be forever adjudged guilty, even honored for it with the infamous 40 whack nursery rhyme. In …
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