Audrey, a homemaker who likes cooking and woodworking, is a woman who expects a certain logic of her life, and, though she knows instinctively and intellectually what decent behavior is, her pain, judgements, and selfishness sometimes make her punishing. Halle Berry’s performance is shaded with anger, dismay, and grief in various combinations and intensities; and it is a deep, truthful, impressive performance.
Tag: film
The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Montgomery Clift in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess and Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity
Clift’s performance is austere and sensitive, and he is so deep inside his character that one cannot see a false moment or move. Michael Logan seems like a man who has found a way of being himself by being a priest: he is alert, direct, frank, moral, and sensitive, contemplative, sacrificing, and of service.
Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, a great film focused on Sicilian aristocracy and cultural change
Burt Lancaster is the patriarch, Don Fabrizio Corbera, the prince of Salina, and his way of life is threatened by revolutionary change: the struggle to unify Italy, and the rising commercial middle class, are at his door. There are predictions that the aristocracy will lose its status, the prominence of its values, and possibly its lands, and that the church may lose as much too.
Death Ends A Holiday: Julia Murat’s film Found Memories
Are they happy or unhappy? Are they afraid or resigned? Are any of them ready to die? The simplicity of the lives of the people in the village gives them a dignified, mysterious quality verging on myth: can they stay alive forever, simply because they choose to? The film achieves its power honestly, plainly, slowly, but power—and finally charm—it does have.
Earth Under Attack, As Entertainment: Attack the Block, and Cowboys & Aliens, two humorous science-fiction films
One of the interesting aspects of this vivid film, full of anticipation, amusement, and anxiety, is the fact that at first the young people are irritating and threatening, the kind that one would cross the street to avoid. Their attitude is rude, language offensive, and acts easily contemptible. It is a lesson that the film allows us to see another side to them—that they can be both resilient and sweet.
Notes on an African-American Canon in Cinema: On Sidewalk Stories, Daughters of the Dust, Eve’s Bayou and other films
African-Americans have wanted to claim and define their own public images in every art—literature, paintings, sculpture, dance, music, film, videos, television. The presentation of African-Americans in the legendary moving picture Birth of a Nation—which presented blacks as both culturally ambitious and personally barbarous—was a continuation of old stereotypes that led to actual violence against blacks. People—blacks and whites—protested the film, inspiring its director D. W. Griffith to make Intolerance, an anti-prejudice reaction to his own film. The African-American image has yet to cease to be controversial.
The Heroic Age of Denzel: the films Antwone Fisher and Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington
I had thought the film a lot simpler than it was—I thought it was some kind of celebration of ghetto life, but I could not have been more wrong: it is about how an abused boy joins the military and meets a navy psychiatrist who helps him to understand his past and use his anger as energy for self-improvement, and to use his loneliness as a spur to connect with a healthy branch of his family. Consciousness leads to purpose.
Heroism, after Wayne and Cooper, in the Work of Eric Bana: Eric Bana’s Love the Beast; and Joe Wright’s Hanna, starring Bana and Saoirse Ronan
Bana has been featured in an impressive panoply of films—I immediately think of Munich and Troy; Bana played an assassin with a conscience in the first and a reluctant royal warrior in the second—and it is hard to predict what Bana might do next or how that will be received or remembered.
Memory, Time Travel, Terrorism, Romance, and Gyllenhaal: Source Code
Will the film seem visionary or shallow to people alive in the future? It is perfectly entertaining to me, and there are aspects of it that are provocative. How much responsibility does one want to take for others? Is it possible to stop unpredictable and uncontrollable disturbed individuals who intend to do things that put the mass public at stake?
The Abundant Spirit of a Poor Girl: Winter’s Bone
What intelligence or strength exists in such persons and lives can feel like the grace of divinity, though it is really a sharpened survival instinct that refuses to die, that insists that it will do everything before it gives in—that, in fact, it will never give in but must be destroyed by greater and more relentless forces. In the film, the young woman, Ree, not yet eighteen, visits the friends and relatives of her father, asking questions, looking for clues.