There are few more charged, more disturbingly redolent images than that of a black man in shackles. And so when Australian director Warwick Thornton, winner of the Venice Special Jury Prize and the Toronto Platform Best Film opens his outback western with just such an image (after an enigmatic prologue of offscreen violence which is gradually explained) it’s like he is drawing a line in the sand — that reddish dust that turns the parched ground round here the color of old blood.

Continue reading Superb Venice & TIFF-Winning Aussie Western ‘Sweet Country’ With Sam Neill [Review] at The Playlist.

You probably haven’t been thinking about libraries a lot recently, what with all the politics and genocide and hurricanes. But then, you may not have been thinking about the University of California, Berkeley, or London’s National Gallery or the northwestern Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights much either, unless you’re one of the small but growing number of devoted fans of documentarian Frederick Wiseman. His run of late-period docu-epics “At Berkeley,” “National Gallery” and “In Jackson Heights” continued in Venice last week with the premiere of his latest, “Ex Libris: New York Public Library,” which is already out in limited release.

Continue reading Frederick Wiseman’s Intensely Rewarding, Humane ‘Ex Libris: New York Public Library’ [Review] at The Playlist.

Though the lead characters of Michaël Roskam‘s “Racer and the Jailbird” (original title: “Le Fidèle”) speak French, and conduct their low-key criminality on the streets of Brussels, their story feels like a song of old-timey heartland America — one of those spare, broken-hearted ditties in which boxers fall for waitresses and love conquers everything except bad luck. It’s an impression partly delivered by Roskam’s smooth, 70s-noir-tinged filmmaking, which suggests doomed romance in even the sunniest scene, but mostly it comes from the combination of leads Adele Exarchopoulos and  Matthias Schoenaerts, who could not boast more chemistry if they were mixed in a conical flask and held over a bunsen burner.

Continue reading Sexy Slow-Burn ‘Racer And The Jailbird’ With Matthias Schoenaerts & Adele Exarchopoulos [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

There’s a seasonal, water-cooler joke around The Playlist: whatever we see at the Venice Film Festival, the Golden Lion top prize inevitably goes to a film we missed and or review way after the fact. This year, this curse is not the case as the universally loved “The Shape Of Water” from Guillermo del Toro won the the coveted main award (our review). “There is unmistakable, idiosyncratic care poured into every frame of ‘The Shape of Water,’ saturated with del Toro’s offbeat compassion and looping, pattern-recognition intelligence,” she wrote glowingly.

Continue reading Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘Shape Of Water’ Wins The Top Prize At The Venice Film Festival at The Playlist.

During the scintillating opening moments of “Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno” a young man peers through a window at a couple having gorgeous, abandoned sex, described in tactile, fleshy images of the beautiful young woman’s tousled hair, panting mouth, fuzzy pudenda, dimpled thighs and sweet folds of puppyish flab. It’s an extraordinarily real, sexy sex scene, immediately reminding us of the thrillingly immersive filmmaking of which Abdellatif Kechiche is capable.

Continue reading Abdellatif Kechiche’s ‘Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno’ [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

In through the nose, out slowly through the mouth…If you are not familiar with the Lamaze breathing technique for women in labor, acquaint yourself with it before donning your hazmat suit and embarking on Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” which uncoils from a murderously tense, tricky and claustrophobic first hour into some of the most sustained escalating insanity (and scorchingly brilliant filmmaking) ever to burn down a cinema screen. An incendiary religious allegory, a haunted-house horror, a psychological head trip so extreme it should carry a health warning and an apologia for crimes of the creative ego past and not yet committed, it’s not just Aronofsky’s most bombastic, ludicrous and fabulous film, spiked with a kind of reckless, go-for-broke, leave-it-all-up-there-on-the-screen abandon, it is simply one of the most films ever.

Continue reading ‘mother!’: Darren Aronofsky’s Scorchingly Brilliant Thriller Is Visceral, Go-For-Broke Madness [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

The Spring 2018 collection from design house Rodarte, aka sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, is aflutter with floaty florals and sheer chiffons and it’s an aesthetic that carries through to their gauzy, terminally insubstantial film directing debut, “Woodshock,” starring, and executive produced by Kirsten Dunst. There’s only so much the word “dreamlike” can cover, but “Woodshock” features it all: double exposures, lens flares, macro close ups, juddering edits, soft-focus sensuality, inexplicable neon pulsations and laser light shows layered over breathy shots of a lissome Dunst unlocking a hitherto unknown boss level of exquisitely feminine dissociation.

Continue reading ‘Woodshock’: Self-Indulgent Slog Among The Logs Is A Dull Dramatic Dream [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

It’s absolutely an oversimplification to say no one does grumpy like Frances McDormand these days. Now don’t overreact. That’s a compliment. McDormand gives her characters a nuance and depth that the screenwriters and directors she works with often can’t articulate.  When she’s playing cranky there is a fire behind her eyes that could stop a charging bear dead in its tracks. Thankfully, that’s the sort of passion she brings to Martin McDonagh’s latest creation, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

Mildred Hayes (McDormand) has had enough.

Continue reading ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’: An Acting Masterclass From Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

If you wanted to be glib and coarse, not to mention antithetical to the film’s convivial tone, you could describe “Victoria & Abdul” as the movie that finally lets a constipated Queen Victoria take a shit. It’s about a doodie dislodged that brings joy and liberation. Hear me out.

In Stephen Frears’ agreeable period costume drama— which is engaging and charming thanks to Judi Dench, if too nonthreatening and ingratiating otherwise— the bowels are the window to the soul.

Continue reading ‘Victoria & Abdul’: Judi Dench Elevates Stephen Frears’ Feel-Good Dramedy [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

In an era of cinematic universes, expanded narratives, and multi-threaded storytelling, there is an attractive elegance in simplicity. For his debut feature, Jason Raftopoulos keeps things refreshingly clean with “West Of Sunshine,” but don’t mistake that for a lack of complexity. Even though the film runs under 80 minutes, the writer/director’s laser focus on his two leads creates a compelling portrait of fatherhood and the intergenerational burden of having to carry the past or the future of a family legacy.

Continue reading ‘West Of Sunshine’ Puts A Warm Ray Of Light On Fatherhood [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

It’s possible that the Coen Brothers are both the best and the worst thing to have happened to George Clooney‘s Hollywood career. The narcissistic idiots he has played for them on more than one occasion added a comedically self-aware string to his acting bow and gave him some of his most memorable characters, vainglorious buffoons he clearly relished playing because when you suffer through life as George Clooney it’s got to be refreshing to have your absurdly handsome leading-man status not taken seriously.

Continue reading ‘Suburbicon’ Finds George Clooney Doing Coen Brothers Karaoke [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

The book that will someday be written detailing the evolution of the cinematic head-stomp will be divided, rather like the most unfortunate victim of “Bone Tomahawk,” into two halves: before S. Craig Zahler‘s ‘Tomahawk’ follow-up, “Brawl in Cell Block 99,” and after. And by rights it deserves to be a similar marker in the career of star Vince Vaughn, who plays protagonist Bradley — occasional stompee, but more often stomper of said heads.

Continue reading ‘Brawl In Cell Block 99’ Is A Bloody, Meaty, Gruesome Blast [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

“Lean on me, when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on,” goes the chorus of the Bill Withers song that the title of Andrew Haigh‘s new movie inevitably recalls. Gird that impression with the fact that “Lean on Pete” is the name of a racehorse, and the film details a coming of age story, and you probably already think you know what you’re getting.

Continue reading ‘Lean On Pete’ Saddles Up A Low-Key, Brokenhearted Drama [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

The burden of faith and the torment of upholding fractured belief has marked many filmmakers, but perhaps none quite as woundingly personally as Paul Schrader, the writer behind “The Last Temptation of Christ” and director behind many searing dramas about psychic and existential affliction. Beyond a cinematic career already teeming with tortured protagonists grappling with their purpose in life, Schrader’s extremely strict Calvinist Christian Reformed Church upbringing has often manifested in the rejection of those values, exploring the perverse nature of mankind, while examining individuals struggling to stay on the right path.

Continue reading Paul Schrader’s ‘First Reformed’ Is A Gripping Spiritual Riff On ‘Taxi Driver’ [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

If it’s true that every culture gets the fairytales it deserves, it’s hard to see what we’ve done lately to merit anything as lovely as Guillermo del Toro‘s “The Shape of Water.” It’s a Cold War paranoia thriller, a 1950s-style creature feature, a quasi-musical cinematic nostalgia trip and a fantasy interspecies love story between a woman and a merman, so brimming with romance and adventure that its effect overflows the screen, filling up rooms and flooding the cinema and threatening to leak through to the floor below.

Continue reading Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘The Shape Of Water’ Is Sweet & Scary Movie Magic [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Waiting and hoping: In Spanish, the native tongue of Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, and the language of her highly anticipated, frequently delayed new film, the word is the same. It’s not just a trick of linguistics, in “Zama,” to wait and to hope are interchangeable concepts, equally futile and equally agonizing. Both give rise to the same torpid kind of madness. To make a film about expectations repeatedly disappointed and gratification constantly postponed is a challenge that Martel, never known for compromise, takes on with an absolute and unswerving sureness.

Continue reading Lucrecia Martel’s ‘Zama’ Is Difficult, Beautiful & Cruel [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Can there be any clearer signal of reality warping as we hurtle toward imminent apocalypse than the fact that Alexander Payne has made a life-affirming film? Venice opener “Downsizing” takes the long road getting there, and it’s a journey full of witty, skittish, scenic detours leading to the occasional dead end. But the ride is not only peppered with moments of inspired humor, it’s also peopled by characters who are expressly, unapologetically likeable, so that by its unexpectedly chipper ending, it’s been an enjoyable, broadly accessible and wonkily heartfelt good-time-at-the-movies. 

Continue reading Alexander Payne’s ‘Downsizing’ With Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig & Christoph Waltz [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

When the Venice Film Festival kicks off next Wednesday it will signal the unofficial start of the 2017-2018 awards season.  Yes, it’s that time again.  It feels like the improbable Best Picture win by “Moonlight” over “La La Land” was just yesterday, doesn’t it? Perhaps it’s because there has been so little to celebrate in the world in the months since. Well, except for some good movies, that is.

Continue reading 13 Oscar Players That Demand Your Attention This Fall And What To Look For at The Playlist.

With the steady stream of blockbusters starting to dry up, fall festival season is fast approaching, and following big TIFF and NYFF announcements earlier in the week, Venice debuted their 2017 slate this morning. The Lido-based festival is one of our favorites, and while it’s sometimes existed in the shadow of Cannes, that’s begun to shift in recent years thanks to some killer lineups (Paul Thomas Anderson and Terrence Malick being among those who’ve debuted movies there), and a killer Oscar run – with “Gravity,” “Birdman,” “Spotlight” and “La La Land” all debuting there before going on to enormous awards season success.

Continue reading Venice 2017 Line-Up Led By Darren Aronofsky, Guillermo Del Toro, George Clooney, William Friedkin & More at The Playlist.