Anthony Lane

Viewers will be split between those who wonder about this silly, trumped-up story and those who already know and love the silliness for what it was. [4 November 2002, p. 110]

Its characters are no different from the rest of us, in the cluster of their annoyances and kicks, yet utterly removed from us by a system that frowns upon ordinary desire. Jafar Panahi's movie, unsurprisingly, has been outlawed in Iran. Nobody likes a prophet. [19 January 2004, p. 93]

The film, which kicks off in a flurry of visual tricks and narrative switchbacks, grows plainer in the later stages, and its concluding mood is surprisingly sad; these kids, who yearned to be something special, turned out to be anything but.

As the movie shows, the whole furtive business of ratings is indeed ridiculous and should be overhauled.

As the film concludes with his upraised hand, conductor’s fingers unfurling against a blue sky, you do feel that you have witnessed a small victory of wisdom over indifference and ennui. When in doubt, strike up the band.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film. Yet the play of emotions on Macdonald’s face tells of worries and wounds much deeper than anything that can be accounted for in the script, and it will take more than a jigsaw, I reckon, even a thousand-piece whopper, to free this woman’s soul.

It takes a female director, I think, to catch children, young and old, at these fragile hours, and also to trace a residue of something childlike in their elders.

The strength of the movie resides mainly in the work of its cameraman, Chris Menges, who delivers a barrage of images as rousing and changeable as the fortunes of Collins himself.

Beast is at its best when Buckley is at her most undaunted, showing us Moll at her most extreme — when she lies down by moonlight, for instance, in the shallow hole where a murder victim was found, beside a potato field.

How can one not revere a movie director who causes the printers of travel brochures to cry out in distress? The Greece of sun, sand, and sea is not open for business here, Angelopoulos having decided that grandeur, grief, and grayness are more his line of work.

The more it sags as a thriller, the more it jabs and jangles as a study of racial abrasion.

Schreiber moves with bearish stolidity, even when boxing, and nothing is more poignantly delayed than Chuck’s realization that most of his wounds were self-inflicted.

It is one of those movies--Antonioni's "Red Desert" being the most flagrant example--that spend so much time brimming with moral and political suggestion that they almost forget to tell us what's actually going on.

The plain fact is that Top Gun: Maverick works. Designed to coax a throng of viewers into a collective and involuntary fist pump, it far outflies the original, while retaining one old-fashioned virtue: the lofty action unfolds against real skies, rather than giant smears of C.G.I. The heroes may do super stuff, but they’re not superheroes.

This movie is a smooch-free zone, and the arc described by its leading lady, proud and nerveless, is an elegant one: she starts by taking a punch to the face, without malice, from another woman, and, at the climax, delivers one herself—unmanning her male opponent with a decisive thump to the groin. If Lara Croft weren’t already a role model, she is now.

The movie is, literally, a tough act to follow, thanks to the brusque, undemonstrative way in which Haneke chops from one subplot to the next. [3 Dec 2001, p.105]

Watching A Christmas Tale, with its bursts of old movies, dregs of empty bottles, lines from books, and fragments of half-forgotten conversations, is like getting to know a family other than your own by leafing through its scrapbooks and laughing at its photograph albums, while it bickers in the next room over stuff you may never understand.

That is an unusually gloomy proposition not just for a studio movie but for a society that, despite the acts and sites of official commemoration, must find good cause to forge ahead from catastrophe. Reign Over Me closes with, at best, a cautious hope, leaving us more anxious than when we went in, and throughout the film there is a stunned and bewildered air hanging over the city, like a heavy smog.

You think afresh of the film’s title and wonder, Who is more unknown here, the nameless victim or the inscrutable doctor?

On the whole, Asante’s movie, though crammed with the white man’s treachery, has a dulled and inoffensive sheen, and cannot match the visual rigor that Ava DuVernay brought to “Selma.”

As Adrien, Pierre Niney is extraordinary to behold: pale, tapered, and flickering, like a candle made flesh.

Graduation, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is a mirthless farce. All that can go wrong does go wrong, and the process is both compelling and close to unwatchable.

It was with both joy and mystification, therefore, that I found myself cackling at What We Do in the Shadows like a witch with a helium balloon.

The result is itself a kind of diorama: exquisitely detailed, assembled with infinite care, but lacking the breath of life.

The result is that Shall We Kiss? puts its viewers in a bind worthy of the lovers themselves: should we organize a Socratic symposium on the issues raised by the film, or hurl our popcorn violently at the screen?

But Byrne, who has lacked good movie roles of late, is marvellously grave.

You cannot help being stirred by the reach and depth, the constant rebuffs to sloppiness, of a strong ensemble.

The tension of Calvary is fitful at best, and much of the movie trips into silliness, but in Brendan Gleeson -- in his proud bearing and his lamenting gaze -- we see the plight of the lonely believer in a world beyond belief. [4 Aug.2014, p.74]

A Master Builder is a bold endeavor, thriftily made, and there is muscle and volume in the performances; but had Demme hung back, and kept things cooler and quieter, the mastery of what Ibsen built, and the agon of his extraordinary hero, would have cast a more looming shadow. [4 Aug. 2014, p.75]

The film is slowed by its own beauty, but it is salvaged by two majestic scenes.

Leconte lacks the austerity to complete a film in which nothing much occurs. And so, with some reluctance, we are bustled toward a climax. [12 May 2003, p. 82]

Almost everything about Permission feels flighty and parochial when laid beside the fateful mire of “Loveless,” yet Hall, in particular, lends a sober grace to the erotic roundelay.

Diop’s work has been in documentary; now we have her first feature, Saint Omer... which retains the attentiveness—the patient ardor—of a good documentary.

More than forty years have passed since A Woman Is a Woman won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival for "originality, youth, audacity, impertinence." (When did you last see a movie that might warrant such an award?) [26 May 2003, p. 102]

The great virtue of the movie is its length: a fat-free seventy-six minutes.

The stage of Early Man, though, is stuffed with men and women — on the Neanderthal spectrum, it’s true, but propelled by needs and greeds much like our own — whereas the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air are reduced to the role of extras. It pains me to say so, but Hognob is not enough.

Their kinship (Gere/Molina)--wholly unsexual yet lit, like that of Martin and Lewis, with an exasperated love--is the beacon of the movie, and it just about survives the lengthening shadows of the later scenes.

The audience for Turn Every Page, I’d guess, will be a medley of Freudians, students of political muscle, and New Yorkers—each bearing a copy of “The Power Broker,” Caro’s 1974 book on Robert Moses, whittled down by Gottlieb to the size of a mere warehouse.

Yet the film, against my wishes, left me unmoved.

It packs political machination, helicopter gunships, single-malt whiskey, Las Vegas, Islamabad, naked butts, and eight years of war. The film, adapted from George Crile’s book, doesn’t always work, but it sure offers value for money.

Although its moral ambition is to honor the tribulations of an Indigenous people, it keeps getting pulled back into the orbit—emotional, social, and eventually legal—of white men.

Anyone who has tamped down that youthful yen for excitement should stay away. But the craving for grownup glamour, however foolish, demands equal satisfaction, and Spectre, in providing it, acquires a throb of mystery that cannot be explained by mere plot.

Such is the hazard of the cartoon: as a form, it thrives on elongation and excess, yet, within its vortices and crannies, who knows what moldy prejudice can breed? [1 December 2003, p. 118]

Despite these shortfalls, there’s much to relish here. To play a guy like Hank, who must resign himself to being second or fourth fiddle, is a tricky task, but Hawke pulls it off in the quiet style that he has made his own.

The Lobster is more than a satire on the dating game. It digs deeper, needling at the status of our most tender emotions.

With no narrator to shepherd us along, the movie feels noisy and restless. The period is revived by a wealth of songs on the soundtrack, and by the sleek and succulent Panther look.

You should, nonetheless, make a date to watch Mangold’s film, and, if you have to duck out after an hour because you’ve left something in the oven, no matter.

Do not be misled by the comic charm of this film. It’s a ghost story, brooded over by the rustling wraiths of bookstores dead and gone.

The father's resignation to that fate is, on balance, the most compelling aspect of the film, and I will not readily forget the sight of him staring out over the town and mourning the long history of his homeland. "We built an industrial colony on top of sheep pens," he says, "and thought we were making a revolution." Maybe Attenberg is topical, after all.

What Kreutzer aims to impress upon us is the effect of smothering and constraint—not only upon her heroine but also upon the female sex, at every social stratum, under Habsburg rule.

In short, Peter Berg has done it again. You come out shaken with excitement, but with a touch of shame, too, at being so easily thrilled.

Here’s the paradox: the closer The Aeronauts gets to peak silliness, the more beautiful it becomes.

Nightcrawler has patches of clunkiness, to be sure, and Lou’s face-off at a police station, near the end, feels graceless and unnecessary. Yet the movie is quite something, and, despite its title, it doesn’t really crawl.

The movie is compact, coolly heartwarming, and gratifyingly uncute. Be warned, though, it also leaves you starving.

What is missing from the film is wit—the deep wit that comes from playing off species and environments against each other.

Most of the innumerable sequels were tripe, but this one has a freshness -- even a kind of wit -- mixed in with all the blood.

I wouldn't trust him (Downey) to look after my handkerchief, but I'll watch him in anything, and that is why Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang--smug as it is, and more like a day in the reptile house than a night at the movies--remains a slithery treat.

Extravagant care is taken with minutiae, and the directors, Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, whistle through the first twenty minutes of the plot with a controlled giddiness that would leave many live-action adventures staggering in their tracks. Yet what a curious plot it is.

As Mostow proved in “Breakdown” and “U-571,” he can churn out excitement at a steady pace; whether he can handle dread--altogether a more unstable material--is another matter. [14 & 21 July 2003, p. 85]

Despite the déjà vu, there is plenty to savor in Miller’s film, and the final third, in particular, is quite the light show.

In truth, Mr. Holmes is not Holmesian at all. It is Jamesian, as shown by a wonderful encounter between Kelmot and Holmes — an attraction of opposites, you might say — on a garden bench.

Do not be fooled by the sci-fi trimmings of this film. Despite its light and amiable manner, it’s a sort of “Deliverance” for the digital age, deriding the ability of tame souls, at a supposedly advanced stage of civilization, to cope with the unknown.

Unlike the youthful romance in “Liberty Heights,” which bore the gleam of a better society, the alliance of Paul and Johnny looks doomed from the start, and the movie, gazing forward, sees no cause for harmony or hope.

Timbuktu is hard to grasp, as befits the sand-blown setting and the mythical status of the name. The more you try to define the movie, the faster it sifts away.

Whereas Cruella sent me back to Dodie Smith, as a blessed escape from what Disney has done to her creations, Tove dispatched me down a rabbit hole, or through a Moomin door. I recommend the trip.

Some strains of this fearsome film, to be honest, feel overworked and arch. When Joe finds his white-haired mother sitting in front of the TV, for example, does it have to be showing “Psycho”?

The best reason to see The Square is the remarkable Terry Notary, last seen in “War for the Planet of the Apes.” Here he plays a performance artist named Oleg, who brings simian havoc, way beyond his brief, to a glamorous event, roaring and thumping among the tuxedos and the gowns. If only he had done the same at Cannes.

The good news is that, while "The Expendables" was the kind of product that should be shown to health inspectors rather than critics, much of Red is jovial and juvenating. [1 Nov. 2010, p.121]

Only at the end do we sense Shelton forcing her hand, and arranging, rather too neatly, for the rebalancing and desaddening of all concerned. [25 June 2012, p.85]

Garrone’s forte, as ever, is to layer the brutish with the beautiful, and to find grace in dereliction.

What Branagh has made is a kind of home movie writ large. It is a private stash of memories and imaginings, which touches only glancingly on the wide and troubled world beyond, and which feels most alive when it turns to face the consolations of home and the thrills that lie in wait on the big screen.

To be at once earthy and ethereal is an uncommon gift. I noticed it, in Browning, when she starred in "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," as the calmly eccentric Violet Baudelaire. Already, as a teen-ager, she seemed older and wiser than the events unfolding around her, and, likewise, in Sleeping Beauty, she impugns the drooling antics of the elderly.

This being an Eisenberg project—he also wrote the screenplay—the laughter comes with a wince attached as standard, and there is barely a scene, in a film constructed from social awkwardness, when your nails aren’t digging into your palms.

Finding Nemo is, as it happens, the most dangerously sugared of the Pixar productions to date--how could any father-finding-son saga be otherwise?--but the threat is now one of oversophistication. [9 June 2003, p. 108]

To see Coogan and Brydon being waited upon by unmasked servers, who carry the plates with bare hands, is to yearn for the touchstones of a mythical past. As one kindly waitress inquires, in a lull between courses, “Do you want to continue?” Yes, if we can. Forever.

You leave the film like one of Giovanni's patients rising from the couch -- far from healed, but amused and pacified by the sympathy that has washed over you. [4 Feb 2002, p. 82]

If there's one movie this spring that you shouldn't see with a date, it's Everyone Else, unless you are looking for a quick, low-budget way to break up. Not that Maren Ade's film is especially gloomy or cynical; merely that it functions as a fearsome seismograph, charting not just the major quakes in a relationship but also the barest tremors.

In previous movies, Michael Bay dabbled wearily in Homo sapiens. At last he has summoned the courage to admit that he has an exclusive crush on machines, and I congratulate him on creating, in Transformers, his first truly honest work of art.

Finally, a voice-over from Jimmy Carter, lauding the efforts of those involved. All this is, frankly, uncool - a pity, because the rest of Argo feels clever, taut, and restrained.

Nobody does shrewishness better than McEwan. [8 August 2003, p. 84]

This interfamily clash, fizzing with one-upmanship, is the highlight of the film, and that’s the problem. The planets of the plot, as it were, are more exciting than the sun around which they revolve.

The good news is that, although Baby Driver is not much of a movie, it is an excellent music video — a club sandwich for the senses, lavishly layered with more than thirty songs.

If this film has a secret, it dwells in the cinematography — by Vittorio Storaro, no less, who shot “The Conformist,” “Last Tango in Paris,” and “Apocalypse Now.” He worked with Allen on a segment of “New York Stories” (1989), but Café Society marks their first full-length collaboration, and the result is ravishing to behold.

The movie, photographed by Laura Valladao, is in black-and-white; add the deadpan dialogue and you may be reminded of, say, early Jim Jarmusch. But there’s not a smack of hipness here, and Jalali is not on a quest for cool. Rather, the story is suffused with an uncommon blend of radiance and resignation, nowhere more rapturously than in the final shot.

Like “Get Out” and “Us,” it is another resourceful meditation on fear and wonder—errant at times, yet strewn with frights and ever alert to the threat of racial hostility.

For all its oddities, this movie does carry weight, and, with more than eight per cent of Americans out of work, the timing of its release here could not be more acute.

Above all, what makes the movie work -- what renders it not merely exhausting but fulfilling -- are the boys. Bier summons fine performances all around, but Nielsen, in particular, turns the role of christian into a drama all its own. [4 April, 2011, p. 82]

It would be churlish to deny that The French Dispatch is a box of delights; Wright, in particular, is a joy as the sauntering hedonist. Equally, though, it would be negligent not to ask of Anderson, now more than ever: What would incite him to think outside the box?

Beyond question a return to the dark, simmering days of their best work, in “Blood Simple” and “Miller’s Crossing.”

To dramatize such binding ideals, for almost two and a half hours, and to conjure precipitous revels from next to nothing, as Miranda and Chu have done, is no small feat.

Sometimes too ominous for its own good.

The pathos of About Schmidt -- of the careful, Chekhovian work that it could have been --gradually slides away. [16 December 2002, p. 106]

This is classic Petzold territory, where you can dwell in a place, or a relationship, without ever quite belonging there.

And here's the strangest thing of all: it works. [September 14, 2009, pg.ll4]

In the end, Ex Machina lives and dies by Alicia Vikander. The film clicks on when she first appears, and it dims every time she goes away.

Given the earnest mayhem that prevails at your local multiplex, there is surely a place for a lightly mocking modernist with a growing distaste for the modern. [9 April 2012, p.84]

What really grips the new movie, for all its amused glances at Swiss Guards and ceremonial pomp, is the prospect of a single soul in crisis. [9 April 2012, p.85]

An efficient, politically inert fantasy.