By Armond White Paul (shaky-cam) Greengrass makes another mess of recent political history in Captain Phillips. This time Greengrass fakes a docu-drama about the 2009 incident when the Maersk Alabama cargo ship, piloted by Vermont merchant marine captain Richard Phillips, was seized off Africa’s eastern coast by Somali pirates, then …
By Armond White A legend of the French New Wave gets a complete retrospective at Film Forum One of my fondest experiences in the New York Film Critics Circle concerned the late Jacques Demy, subject of a complete career retrospective at Film Forum (Oct. 4 –17): When Demy’s first two …
By Armond White Dominique Sanda, the androgynous siren of Bertolucci’s The Conformist and 1990, appears in Jacques Demy’s Une Chambre en Ville wearing a luxurious fur coat and nothing underneath. She trolls the streets of Paris to escape her confining marriage, looking for a way out–a room with a view …
By Armond White The opalescent Planet Earth, the object that opens Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, belongs to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a shorthand image–evoking intellectual contemplation and wonder that Cuaron doesn’t earn. Cuaron borrows it without (pardon the expression) gravitas. The phenomenon of creation dresses up a tale of …
By Armond White Maybe if Ron Howard hadn’t been the most adorable child actor in Hollywood history, he wouldn’t have gone on to be a filmmaker who makes everything banal–cutesifying every story, no matter the topic, into movies so dull and unoriginal reviewers reflexively–mistakingly–call them “well crafted.” Howard’s second career …
By Armond White Two films on faith this week are not a coincidental appearance. They suggest a transition in culture from the prevailing agnosticism to spiritual awareness. One film is masterly, the other fumbling. In Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, Keller Dover is a modern man possessed of Biblical rage when his …
By Armond White Harvey Weinstein may call 2013 “a great moment” for “great black filmmakers” just because he happens to be releasing three high-profile films with Black subjects, but the year’s first real sign of new life and energy in movies about Black Americans is the low-budget Newlyweeds, written and …
By Armond White When the American mobster family the Blakes join the Witness Protection Program and relocate to a small town near Normandy in France, they soon learn what the natives think of them: “They expect color, noise, excess.” That’s also a comment on how the gangster genre is perceived …
By Armond White In the low-light neo-noir visual scheme of Blue Caprice, dark-skinned actor Isaiah Washington is automatically a silhouette, an emblematic obscure object of both dread and desire–the fear of and attraction toward murderous African American vengeance. Washington portrays John Muhammad, the elder member of the two-man team responsible …
By Armond White The Weinstein Company (formerly Miramax) really knows how to sell its product. They even sell a movie while you’re watching it which is the first problem with Shane Salerno’s Salinger. This bio-doc of the fiction writer J.D. Salinger, who became something of a recluse in the years …
