By Armond White Novelist Cormac McCarthy must have been a fan of Breaking Bad since he steals its byzantine plot–its essence–for The Counselor, the film billed as his “first original screenplay.” The combination cynicism-and-pretense that motivates this crime film about a lawyer (Michael Fassbender) who gains wealth from assisting clients …
By Armond White In a third of the time it took Olivier Assayas to turn 70s terrorism into a epic hipster rave (replete with post-punk soundtrack) in Carlos, Costa-Gavras exposes the nature of social and financial compromise–moral terrorism–in Capital. This timely story of how Phenix Bank, a French financial institution, …
By Armond White The New York Film Festival’s presentation of Blue is the Warmest Color repeats the Cannes slate along with such repulsive Festival-circuit fare like Jia Zhangke’s odious A Touch of Sin. Now we know what Spielberg, Hollywood director par excellence, was up against. Here’s how I suss out …
By Armond White One of the major Academy Award bloopers occurred in 1974 when Robert Redford was nominated Best Actor for The Sting and not The Way We Were (both were released in 1973). He seemed miscast and distant in the former but movie-star idolized and emotionally committed in the …
By Armond White It was impossible for Kimberly Peirce to direct a remake of Carrie that could live up to Brian DePalma’s 1976 original. Two cultural events got in the way. First, political correctness so dominates our culture that the mythological aspects in Carrie’s reverse-Cinderella story (a repressed, unpopular high …
By Armond White Brutality, violence and misery get confused with history in 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of the 1853 American slave narrative by Solomon Northup, who claims that in 1841, away from his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., he was kidnapped and taken South where …
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 …
