A gorgeous and generous portrait of a woman trapped in a life that she does not - cannot - perceive is political. For Marie Antoinette, Versailles will be her prison, her home, her source of delight, her whole universe, and finally, her undoing.
The defences Marie builds up to survive in that gilded cage - burying herself in fleeting pleasures, in minutiae, in things - also leave her utterly ill-equipped to reckon with the forces from the outside world that…
"With Major Lawrence, mercy is a ion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable."
A few words in defence of the oft-maligned second half of Lawrence of Arabia.
Yes, the 1st act is stirring, visually eloquent, ravishingly romantic. Irresistible. It is the seeding and flowering of a myth.
What makes the 2nd act so magnificent is how completely it tears that mythology apart, root and stem. The narrative loses its centre,…
A deeply, delightfully silly movie. Angelia Jolie already screams movie star (and boy does the lascivious camera know it), but the film around her is a riotous mess. Despite betraying genuine respect for its anti-establishment heroes, the film saddles them with a plot that doesn’t remotely threaten the status quo. But if the plot can’t be radical, director Iain Softly compensates by making everything else captial-R RADICAL in the most 90s way possible.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that…
It's quite refreshing to watch a teen rom-com that puts friendship before the fleeting high-school romance!
That said, I wish the object of affection herself, Aster, was a little more fleshed out, and a little less 'dream girl' - she never feels like a complete person, which leaves the love triangle (and the film) lop-sided.
I expended so much energy in every given scene trying to 'solve' what was happening (and why) that the set-pieces held no weight, and the characters left no impression.
Yes, I trust that Nolan has a big whiteboard somewhere that proves every act of entropy lines up - but take all that away, and what's left?
