Remember the great disaster movies of the 1970’s, films like The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, and Earthquake? The formula was simple: put as many stars as you could find in the path of a natural disaster and let God and Irwin Allen sort out the winners and losers. Credit Werner Herzog with resurrecting the genre. For his latest film, Queen of the Desert, Herzog collected a handful of household names, put them in a rickety vehicle, and crashed them over and over again. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Robert Pattinson’
Queen of the Desert Review
Posted: March 27, 2015 in 2015 Berlinale, Drama, ReviewsTags: Damian Lewis, David Lean, Gertrude Bell, Holly Earl, James Franco, Lawrence of Arabia, Mark Lewis Jones, Nicole Kidman, Robert Pattinson, Werner Herzog
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Life Review
Posted: February 22, 2015 in 2015 Berlinale, Drama, ReviewsTags: Alessandra Mastronardi, Anton Corbijn, Ben Kingsley, Dane DeHaan, Dennis Stock, James Dean, Life Magazine, Luke Davies, Robert Pattinson
Life offers a respite from the ongoing debate over whether critics and moviegoers unfairly savage films based on true stories by rigorously fact checking them and then offering up discrepancies between the celluloid world and the historical record. The inclination for a full forensic examination of movies like The Imitation Game, Selma, and American Sniper will more likely intensify than abate. The noxious rejoinder that “it’s only a movie” never satisfied and, in the foreseeable future, will certainly not even given pause to those who return from the multiplex and proceed directly to Google. (more…)
Maps to the Stars Review
Posted: September 21, 2014 in ReviewsTags: Bruce wagner, David cronenberg, Evan Bird, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson, Sarah Gadon
Maps to the Stars premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in April of this year, competing for the Palme d’Or as best picture and earning a best actress award for Julianne Moore. The takeaway from that success for the casual filmgoer may be somewhat misleading. Just as many went to see Black Swan after hearing of Natalie Portman’s performance as a troubled ballerina only to be shocked that director Darren Aronofsky had used horror film conventions to tell his story of a dancer descending into a hellish madness, so, too, may some viewers be lured into this movie by incorrect expectations. Maps to the Stars is not a mainstream motion picture. Director David Cronenberg was, is, and always will be, a genre director. That is not intended as an insult or a limitation. Is it a knock on Hitchcock to say he was a director of thrillers? The brilliance of Cronenberg’s filmography is self-evident; his influence on the industry well documented. From the venereal horror productions of They Came From Within and Rabid through the sci-fi mind screws of Videodrome, The Fly, and eXistenZ with stops along the way to look at the outcasts on the fringes of society in Naked Lunch, M.Butterfly, and Crash, Cronenberg has been directing the most demanding, challenging, and prophetic of genre films for almost 40 years.
Meet Mr. Karma 