REVIEW: London Film Festival 2022 Roundup

White Noise

With White Noise, Noah Baumbach has managed to make a compelling and remarkably coherent dramedy from Don DeLillo’s postmodern epic of optimism and catastrophe.

Jack Gladney (Adam Driver; winningly ungainly with long limbs and beer belly) is a renowned professor of “Hitler studies”, who works at a fictional American college sometime in the 1980s.…

REVIEW: House of Gucci

Between House of Gucci and Christopher Pratt’s casting as Mario, it’s been a difficult time for Italians in cinema.

Ridley Scott’s second film this year after historical epic The Last Duel, House of Gucci is more in the vein of his 2017 effort All the Money in the World – a stylish crime drama based on a real-life event, though trading that film’s shadowy restraint for a smorgasbord of scenery chewing character work.…

REVIEW: The Last Duel

In The Last Duel, Ridley Scott returns to his cinematic first love.

The idea of two rivals in a duel to the death is an innately romantic one, but where Scott’s directorial debut was devoted to it, in his latest it’s both beginning and ending.…

REVIEW: He Dreams of Giants

Writing about He Dreams of Giants feels a bit like Kirk Lazarus talking about his acting process.

2002’s Lost in La Mancha was a making-of in search of a finished product. Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, whose troubled production it documents, was one of the great unfinished movies – until it wasn’t.…

PODCAST: Top 10 Films of 2010s [Movie RobCast]

We started back in 2016 as The Electric Shadows Podcast. We enter the ’20s as The Movie RobCast, with a gorgeous new image, courtesy of designer Bridge Fazio.

And episode 77 is a biggy, in which Robs Daniel and Wallis run through their respective Top 10s of the 2010s.

PODCAST: Oscar Nominations 2019 [Electric Shadows]

Rob Daniel & Rob Wallis touch the sore tooth that is Oscar nominations 2019.

They discuss the insanity, or at least inanity, of nominating Bohemian Rhapsody for Best Picture, and how safe the Best Picture nods are in general. They’re happy Spike Lee finally has his Best Director nomination, and acknowledge a few other things the Academy got right.…

REVIEW GRAB-BAG: The Dark Tower, Logan Lucky, & The Hitman’s Bodyguard

The Dark Tower

Or How to Make Soup out of Stephen King’s Keystone Series.

In brief: Take an epic eight-book series inspired by both Lord of the Rings and Spaghetti Westerns, strip away the character and the uniqueness, boil down the mythology and the plot, and reduce to 95 minutes.…

Silence brings Scorsese’s obsession with theology & suffering near miraculously to the surface

What is the worst thing you could do to yourself, and under what circumstance might such a thing be not only permitted but necessary?

This, in general terms, is the central question of Silence, a long-term passion project by Martin Scorsese and the latest of his works to tackle with the burden of religious conviction.…

Paterson is a miracle in the clarity and beauty of everyday life

Films do not have to be dark in order to be profound. Sometimes the human condition can, in fact, be hopeful.

No better is this demonstrated than in Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s heartfelt ode to blue-collar life in all its ordinary extraordinariness.…

Midnight Special lays its light on us

 

The fourth film of 37-year-old Arkansan director Jeff Nichols, Midnight Special feels like a narrative made to fit its title.

Named for an old folk standard, it follows Roy (Michael Shannon), and his son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), a goggle-wearing preteen gifted with supernatural abilities.