saschakrieger Reviews

Selma (2014)

A Portrait of the Hero as a Human

[8/10 · 4 March 2015]

No, this doesn't seem right: words of doubt are the first we hear in this film centering on the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner and leader if the United States civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s Martin Luther King. Dies it refer to his Nobel acceptance speech, the festive tie, or his public role? Selma starts long after King talked about his dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the night of King's greatest honor, the Oslo Nobel ceremony. A global hero, an admired fighter for justice and equality, a deeply hated figure amongst those who feared and opposed change. The film accompanies King through the battle for voting rights in the Alabama town of Selma right to President Johnson announcing the Voting Rights Act in 1965.Selma focuses on the events of those months and on the people at their center, first and foremost King himself. British actor David Oyelowo plays King as a determined leader, a charismatic speaker and a doubting and quite flawed human. As the hero King moves to the shadows, the man emerges.

It is Selma's great strength that it eschews all the temptations of the biopic genre, that it avoids the spectacular but is content with shedding a glimpse of a pivotal moment in recent American history. It moves into back rooms, kitchens, King's home, churches turned into makeshift meeting rooms. The public stance – the standoff in front of the Selma courthouse, the three marches to Montgomery, King's speeches – provide the narrative frame and are filmed in a haunting way, especially the first march's violent suppression that director Ava DuVernay and cinematographer Bradford Young depict in slow motion, accentuating the brutality as well the suffering of the brave marchers while giving the whole scene the nightmarish quality of an event that defies understanding. It is in scenes like this that the viewer realizes why these men and women do what they do, why they really have no choice. The doubts come in the more intimate moments: King's conversations with his wife, the seemingly endless debates with other leaders, an attempt as resignation diverted in a long and calmly narrated car ride.

Here, King is a man full of fear and doubt, who calls singer Mahalia Jackson in the middle of the night to hear her soothing voice, who often wonders if the price isn't too high, if he isn't hurting his family too much, if his public struggle might not do more harm than good. A man, too, who likes a laugh and who has not been entirely faithful to his wife, a man not completely immune to fame and admiration. But also a stubborn fighter who stands up to President Johnson, played memorably by another British actor, Tom Wilkinson. It is true that Johnson's portrayal is a little more negative than history warrants but the film needs him as a well-enough meaning but pragmatic antagonist far removed from the plain racism of people like Alabama governor George Wallace. Another troubled man, beset by various pressures, trying to do the right thing but more than once lost in a tangle he can hardly see through. In the end, Johnson comes around and King triumphs but it is a triumph that is only the beginning of new fights – for both men.

Young's camera often moves King off center, slightly to the left or right, symbolizing a man far less certain than his public persona. A golden light drenches most scenes, not romanticizing, suggesting a different time, the treacherous marshlands of memory, while the camera brings these people close to us with their struggle that is far from over today. a struggle fought as much in dark rooms and conflicting, doubtful minds as on the street. What Selma most succeeds in is to take the events of 1965 out of the history books and return them to the people behind them. It depicts the legends as humans, struggling with all kinds of everyday human conditions, fear, doubt, indecisiveness, anger. It depots King and his allies as humans fighting a human fight that is heroic entirely in it being completely ordinary, at least for those involved. Change starts with the "ordinary" who come to a point when they feel like they have no choice but to act. When, in the end, Selma uses original footage of the third march, Ferguson (which is alluded to in the film's Oscar-winning flagship song "Glory") seems closer than ever. Selma could not be any more contemporary than it is.

www.stagescreen.de

Whiplash (2014)

Blood, sweat and music

[9/10 · 27 February 2015]

No, this will not be fun and games. This much is clear as the camera moves slowly through a dark corridor towards a similarly dark and bare room with a sole drum kid behind which a young man is sweating. Relentlessly – against his instrument and himself – he is repeating the same patterns and rhythms, again and again. The distant view of him becomes intimate and then dissolves – into partial glimpses of his face, hands, drumsticks. There will be much sweat, tears, blood, the drumsticks will become instruments of torture inflicted by the young man to himself. If love for music was the initial motivation to take up this strenuous activity, he has moved far beyond it at the film's outset. Miles Teller plays Andrew, an ambitious young musical student moving into the dark realm of obsession, willing to throw away family, friendship, love in pursuit of that elusive dream and nightmare of being someone special, being remembered, not fading into oblivion when his tombstone is erected. His face will harden and shut and distort itself as he will learn to play the game.

A game whose master is Terence Fletcher (JK Simmons) a legendary musician turned sadistic teacher who will do anything to achieve perfection, leaving plenty of corpses along the wayside. Soon Fletcher discovers Andrew and recruits him to his elite band in which survival of the fittest is the norm. Andrew, starting out in friendly naivety quickly learns the game, accepts the power struggle, lashes out against his competitors and ultimately overestimates his power. What starts out as a coming of age film about a boy pursuing his dream turns into a thriller in which strong wills battle and only one can survive. If Andrew wants to be the one he has to turn into the other, become Fletcher, lose all scruples, become unashamedly brutal and cruel. Against himself and against others. As in all good thrillers there are various twists and turns and, when all seems to be over, an epic showdown that leaves the viewer shaking. By that time, the lines between good and bad have long been blurred, the distinction become irrelevant, the price to be payed for the dream's pursuit unpayable and at the same time unquestioningly accepted.

Whiplash is an unforgiving powerhouse of a film, an uncompromising tale about what trying to be the best entails, how much it can strip you of your humaneness, and about the choices one must make in life. Andrew makes his, has them taken away and restored and, given a second chance, returns to the path that already almost destroyed him once – or maybe it already did. But it's his choice, he is victim and culprit all in one. Teller plays his role with brutal honestly and he has a frighteningly impressive counterpart in a Mephistophelic Simmons whose Faust ultimately threatens to supplant him. The film never goes for simple morality, it asks questions that we seem to be able to answer easily. But then we see this utterly likable boy find his own answers which are very different from ours and we start wondering whether all this might not be a little more complicated than we though.

Director Damien Chazelle tells this story in the frantic rhythm of the jazz that is instrument and fate and abyss of those that fight in this arena, armed with drumsticks that are as deadly a weapon as swords. The images move with the pulse of this throbbing, unrelenting music, fragmenting into long shots and extreme close-ups, a dance of mosaic pieces that becomes its own song. Camera, editing, sound merge into a never-ending beat that accelerates and slows down, frantically races to its climax before it comes to a standstill only to restart itself into a powerful back and forth as the opponents who are also accomplices engage in one last battle. Light and color are part of the package, too: the slightly nostalgic glow of romantic dreams becomes the pale grey of disillusion before turning into the golden light of competition. Who has won and what would be the criteria for winning, what its price. Whiplash sings its own song of life, a life that isn't black or white, a life in which winning might be fatal and the greatest triumph the worst defeat. It has a million equation but no answers. All it offers is blood, sweat, tears. And music.

Knight of Cups (2015)

Lost in Malibu

[2/10 · 17 February 2015]

Life and the universe in general, love, life, birth and death and everything in-between. No doubt, Terrence Malick doesn't do it below this. When they work, his essay poems about the great existential questions are mesmerizing, test the limits of what film can do, convey a truth words alone can never carry. When they don't, they become tedious, pretentious exercises by a film maker going through the motions. Unfortunately, his first Berlinale competition film since The Thin Red Line won the Golden Bear in 1999, decidedly belongs to the latter category. It might even be its first entry. "Where do I begin", the disembodied voice of Christian Bale repeatedly asks. Wherever that might be, it never happens. The camera hovers as usual, mostly around Bale who, it seems from the few hints we get, is a not too successful screenwriter, going through various attempts at relationships, some remembered, some more imagined, deals with family baggage and doesn't say much. What is clear is that he's lost for any real direction in his life. Malick illustrates further by his usual juxtaposition of the individual against a vast, beautiful and autonomous universe, in this case mostly the beaches and mountains around Los Angeles. Except when he speaks the commentary that goes from voice to voice, character to character and talks of the pilgrimage that is life, fragments one tries to put together to get at a bigger picture that never emerges, speaks of a fear of living– all household ingredient of a kitchen sink kind of philosophy of life. The sound quickly moves into and even faster out of scenes, the musical score dominated by Vaughan Williams, Grieg and Debussy is ever-present, several narrative levels co-exist at the same time. However, the bigger picture never emerges. For a very simple reason: Its component parts don't mean anything. Those who appreciate Malick's unique film making aren't used to disappointments. They'd better brace themselves this time.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

Miracle on 44th Street

[10/10 · 3 February 2015]

The drum is beating relentlessly as the camera moves down narrow and shabby corridors, pauses in an actor's backstage dressing room, both of them seeming to have their best days long behind them, the movement, the claustrophobic space and the drumming intensifying to a foreboding, threatening atmosphere that turns this dirty underbelly of Broadway glamour into the darkness of a tortured man's soul. Michael Keaton who was Batman plays Riggan Thomson who was Birdman. A former movie star way past his prime trying to resurrect his career by turning to the stage, establishing himself as a serious actor and battling more himself, his diminished self-worth, his shortcomings as a husband and father than any outside pressure. His demons are with him – literally, in a move that quotes Keaton's Batman days. Keaton, a seemingly washed-up has-been plays a seemingly washed-up has-been – and he does so with a force, an honesty, a self-effacing radical relentlessness that would guarantee his an Academy Award almost any year (though perhaps not this one due to Eddie Redmayne's portrayal of Stephen Hawking). A man struggling between outside appearance and a growing inability to escape the inner voice, Keaton's performance is one for the ages.

Alejandro González Iñárritu has the camera follow his protagonist with intricate and never- ending tracking shots as we accompany him through the labyrinth that is a theatre's hidden undergrowth and the maze of a trouble soul. The rhythm of the camera, the nervous pounding of the drum, the tortured dishevelment of Keaton's face all convey the sense of a human soul and mind becoming unhinged and struggling to recover any sanity he can muster. The existential fight of an individual navigating the shaky line between the personal and the public. González Iñárritu effortlessly moves from the naturalistic to the delusional and the dream-like fantastic as reality ans imagination become harder and harder to tell apart. He bridges that fragile frontier as well as time gaps in single, apparent unedited shots, time and space become fluid and as unstable as the protagonist's mind. Keaton is surrounded by a staler cast led by Edward Norton playing a sociopathic actor whose search for truth has turned him into an extremist in life and work. He is Keaton's nemesis, foil, catalyst to unleash his power. Then there are Emma Stone as Riggan's troubled and ever angry daughter, Zach Galifianakis as loyal friend and choleric manager, Naomi Watt's as a self-conscious actress impatient to make it and Andrea Riseborough as Riggan's lover torn between cynicism and a longing for closeness.

As good as the cast is, the miracle this film is lies in its ingenious story-telling. How Alejandro González Iñárritu weaves camera, editing sound and Keaton's acting together, the way he combines drama, fantasy, comedy and satire (his portrait of the New York theatre industry is quite poignant), how he infuses it with New York's manic heartbeat and has it all mirror in Michael Keaton's face has not been seen in film before. In an Oscar year in which Richard Linklater redefined film making by stretching time beyond the hitherto feasible, González Iñárritu reimagines the possibilities of filmic story-telling. Birdman is one of those films where the critic's pen must fail. It needs to be more than seen, it has to be experienced as the complex and ridiculous symphony of light and dark, of the universal and the trivial, of the human condition and poignantly funny comedy that it is.

www.stagescreen.de

The Theory of Everything (2014)

A Dream Called Life

[9/10 · 30 January 2015]

Blurred shapes in golden light. Round and round it goes, a figure, it slowly emerges, in a wheelchair, effortlessly transforming to a spinning bicycle wheel in soft blue light. This begins James Marsh's film about Stephen Hawking, the best-known science of our time, struck with a degenerating disease at 21 years of age, who has lived more than 50 years after being given no more than two by doctor. An unlikely story, a miracle, one might once have said, but first and foremost a story of perseverance and love. Love to knowledge and love between two humans, rolled all in one. The film centers on the relationship between Hawking and his first wife Jane who stuck with him through it all, stubbornly refused to turn off life support when doctors gave up and who eventually had to find a new life without him.

Marsh and his director of photography, Benoît Delhomme, paint the story in soft pastel-like colors interspersed with grainy interludes of wordless happiness, and infuse it with the rhythm of a flowing ballad, a never-ending song, giving the film a dream-like quality. The story's harder edges – the fear, the overwhelming demands of a disabled husband, the eventual parting of ways – are not denied but they are not delivered as dramatic highlights or turning points, but rather as matter-of-fact stages in a life story unfolding in a time which is both linear as it is stagnate or, to return to the folk's opening, circular. There are no outbreaks, just a series of acceptances that life might do many things – but it never goes according to plan. But even in the most painful moments, there is a warmth to the characters that seems almost unreal. The Theory of Everything has the enchanted nature of a dream – and just like a dream it is as real as human experience gets.

The film touches on and sketches the various stages of Hawking's scientific development but it doesn't focus on his theories. Instead, it embeds them in a larger narrative of human should looking for meaning: in science, love, religion or even themselves. At the center of all this is Eddie Redmayne who delivers an earth-shattering performance as Hawking. He starts out as a somewhat clumsy geekish youth who as the disease begins to encapsulate his body is more and more reduced to tiny, but telling movements of eyes and mouth. Redmayne never shows off, his acting is subtle, accentuating the stages of decay while at no moment allowing us to forget that his character's brain and soul are exempt from the implosion of his physical powers. If it's true that the greatest actors only need the slightest wink or twitch to convey a world of emotions, Eddie Redmayne belongs to the very best. Yes, The Theory of Everything at times appears to simple, to easily flowing, as in the triangle between Stephen, Jane and her eventual second husband Jonathan. But then again, it is not a naturalistic painting but an impressionistic sketch merged with a romantic landscape. A dream called life. Nothing less.

www.stategescreen.de

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013)

We dream therefore we live

[8/10 · 5 August 2014]

One might want to call this inevitable: that Jean-Pierre Jeunet, film's high priest of wild imagination, king of the bizarre and quirky, cinema's greatest child would end up making a film with a child protagonist. Jeunet found that protagonist in T.S. Spivet, the title character of Reif Larsen's best-selling novel about a boy burning with a passion for science, a keen observer of life with a strong will to leave his mark on the world and a dark secret. And even more so, he found him in Kyle Catlett, a small, frail blonde with piercing blue eyes, hesitant enthusiasm, an awake yet guarded mind, an infectious smile that is never sure of itself. For Catlett, Jeunet made the role younger, turning the book's twelve-year-old genius into an even more unlikely ten-year old through whose eyes he makes us see the world for those miraculous, mesmerizing, blissful 105 minutes.

And what a set of eyes they are: warm and loving, yet at the same time distant and objective, T.S. deconstructs the world in order to return it to order. As so often with Jeunet, he makes us look at the ordinary in an entirely new way. His hero's scientific glance transforms the everyday into miracles, makes the normal appear bizarre and vice versa. It is a look Jeunet had perfected in his masterpiece Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, better known shortly as Amélie. It is a world inhabited by quirky yet mostly lovable people: T.S.'s harassed mother (Helena Bonham Carter) who is obsessed with classifying insects, his quiet cowboy father Callum Keith Rennie, his entertainment addicted sister Gracie (Niamh Wilson). Jeunet paints them close to the caricaturesque, often adding an absurdist touch, a little too much color to make them appear brighter and clearer than life, only enhancing their humanity by turning the screw a little further.

Jeunet lets his hero narrate the story: how he, after his twin brother's fatal accident, sets out to improve the world through science, how he sets out to make his way to Washington, DC in order to pick up a prestigious science award. T.S.'s off voice provides distance, context, irony, humor – but above all imagination. Visually, Jeunet indulges in small imaginative transgressions of realism, giving the film a playful, exploratory feel that perfectly matches his protagonist. The borders between the real and the imagined are fluent, their realms overlapping rather than separated. The wideness of rural Montana is too beautiful to be true, it may be more a country of the mind, but for Jeunet this doesn't make it less real. For him, imagination is the true life force, what one can dream of must be true. So one might wonder that T.S. keeps encountering good and friendly and helpful people, meets little conflict and arrives safely and almost smoothly in Washington as if he was dreaming it. And maybe he is, maybe we are.

Just like every dream this one has to end. And so it does and the film fizzles out in a mixture of flashy media satire, crude anti-modernism and sentimental celebration of family values. The simple, somewhat quirky yet honest and lovable people on the one side, the falseness of the polished capitalist façade on the other. T.S., of course, returns into the loving arms of his family and escapes the cruel materialism of a world governed by fame, power and money. No doubt the end weakens the overall effect of the film – but cannot break it. For the power of human imagination it celebrates and visualizes, the playful anarchism it embodies, the shameless naïve optimism it upholds survive the crudeness and the one-dimensional caricature it ends up embracing. As the voice of T.S. Spivet prevails so does his spirit that calls on us to learn a new way of looking at world. Through observing eyes which believe that anything is possible as long as we can dream it. Imagine that.

Her (2013)

Life and life only

[10/10 · 28 April 2014]

A kind, faintly smiling, somewhat dreamy face in close-up tenderly speaking words of love, desire, longing. Thus opens Her, Spike Jonze's latest film, that won him his first Academy Award, for "Best Original Screenplay". Theodore Twombly earns his money writing "personal handwritten letters" for others, letters directed at loved ones. They are poetic writings full of warm emotion – and they are fake. For he, freshly separated from his one and only love, has no-one to write them to. Shutting himself off in his stylish but empty apartment he tries out a new personalized computer operating system based on artificial intelligence – and falls in love with "Samantha". Her follows the budding and developing relationship between the desperate loner and the bodiless voice. As they help each other finding or rediscovering their identities, as they ease each other into understanding and accepting who they are, they build a closeness, an intimacy which might not last but which definitely is as real as it gets.

The most surprising thing about Her is how my traps it avoids that it could easily have fallen into. It could have become a science-fiction film carried away by its exciting premise, a farcical comedy indulging in the ridiculousness of its preposterous plot, a sentimental melodrama about loneliness and the impossibility of love, a theatrical showpiece for the acting skills of Joaquin Phoenix or a biting critique of the loneliness inherent in a world in which everyone is connected and separated alike by modern technology. Her incorporates all these aspects, it comments on the despair of a man who has all the world open to him but cannot become a part of it, it is wonderfully funny and ironical, does not shy away from big emotions and paints a compelling picture of a future that might be just around the corner. But the film is more than that: just like Hoyte van Hoytema's camera that combines close-ups with a soft, sweeping motion including slow tracking shots and carefully used hand-held camera-work, the film remains locked tightly to its protagonist.

Phoenix plays Twombly with delicate understatement, almost bordering on shyness, an insecure, complex-ridden man refusing closeness whose only connection with life are his memories, which Jonze inserts as short and somewhat random series of fragmentary images, and other people's love stories acted out in the letters he writes. The way he slowly and tenderly starts opening up, as his pale features are beginning to breathe life, is as remarkable as it is entirely natural and unspectacular. Such is the unassuming way Jonze characterizes Samantha: Just like Twombly she finds herself through second-hand emotions, as she goes through emails and websites and images she patches together a personality from what technology provides her with. Finding one's way through the daily media overkill and forming a sense of self through it is a key element of her and one that Jonze just throws out there without any preaching or teaching tone.

Instead, he allows Her an entirely organic growth, takes his time to tell the story which he lets unfold in a poetic flow of images drenched in pale but subtly warming colors, accentuated by the equally unassuming and highly emotive original score by the outstanding Canadian band Arcade Fire. Her is not a satire, a critical pamphlet, a colorful comedy or a tear-jerking drama but a tender and despite its closeness and intimacy never intrusive portrait of a man seeking himself and the other, a touching meditation about the possibility of love. It poses questions it does not answer, but the chance remains open that answers might be found. Ultimately, the film comes full circle as it echoes and soaks up the poetry encapsulated in its opening letters, freeing it from paper, bringing it to life. In a career already marked by exceptional films (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), Her is Spike Jonze's most outstanding effort to date.

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Captain Phillips (2013)

Life in a nutshell

[9/10 · 19 March 2014]

There are some who say that the most important part of a film is its ending. Examples of films which have been all but destroyed by the way they end are legion. Much rarer are the cases of films that really come into their own at the very end. Luckily, Captain Phillips, based on the much publicized case of the 2009 hijacking of an American cargo ship off the Somalian coast, is part of the latter, considerably smaller group. After his rescue, Phillips (Tom Hanks in his strongest performance in years) is taken in by highly efficient and well-trained Navy personnel who perform routine checks, ask routine questions, follow routine protocol. Phillips, however, who we have just watched for two hours working like a well-oiled survival machine, a master at adapting to any change of situation, a great tactician and relentless fighter, has turned into a zombie-like shell: words fail him, simple movements and motions become impossibly complicated. The puzzled bewilderment, the gaping hole the instinct to survive has left, contrast drastically with the self-congratulatory air of everyone else to who this has just been a successful operation. To Phillips, this is his life.

And so the ever-moving hand-held camera, efficiently industrious, full of unchecked energy clashes with the image of a soul that has come to a brutal halt, a personal world that has stopped turning, a heart that has skipped a beat. And all of a sudden, the same look that has just been supportive and empathic is now voyeuristic, indecent, intrusive. For the well-made thriller has revealed something existential, something essential to human nature. A primal fear and helplessness that we are so good at covering up. This ending, this emptying face will remain when everything else about this film has disappeared. And there is quite a lot to this. For the previous two hours Captain Phillips has been a gripping thriller, a claustrophobic clash of human desires and fears and needs whose space grows ever tighter: from two separate locations to a ship, a bridge, a cellar-like engine room to a tiny closed lifeboat that looks grotesquely pathetic compared to the war machinery the Navy has brought.

Yet inside, all of human drama takes place: there's power and powerlessness, brutality and fear, despair and hope, the first world and the third, all enclosed in literally, a nutshell. And pretty evenly distributed among the hijackers and the victims, the guilty and the innocent. There is no black or white, only the gray, the pale, ghost- like hue of the indifferent sea and sky, a vast unthinking universe in which life is merely an afterthought. They have to deal with each other: the confident, experience, smart Phillips and the aggressive, skinny, helpless Muse (Barkhad Abdi in a haunting, memorable performance). Two lost souls whose final bewilderment in the face of deadly efficiency reveals them as inhabitants of the same planet without unduly shifting guilt. Yes, the highjacker turned kidnapper is guilty, yes he is a criminal deserving of punishment, but first and foremost, he is human, just like his prisoner. There are no monsters in this battle of wills in which both are pawns as well as actors, swept around by the tides while taking responsibility and making decisions.

The camera is always close, hardly ever still, reflecting the hectic twists and turns of this duel, this frantic battle to survive. Captain Phillips thrives on Paul Greengrass' excellent direction, his impeccable timing, the documentary-like camera work, the hypnotic rhythm and gripping editing, the clear, pale, matter-of-factly imagery. Yes, it is a thriller and a highly efficient one. But it is one that moves from outward suspense to inner drama, just as the space narrows the inner battles come to the forefront. No matter if captain or crew or kidnappers: in the end, they all want to survive, their own worst enemy is fear. Which is ultimately the film's chief protagonist: Captain Phillips is a film about fear, about what it does to people, no matter on what side of the processes that create the fear they appear to be. Its destructive force as well as its ability to bring out a strength hitherto unsuspected, have never been more visible, its angels and devils never clearer, the key role it plays in all of human existence, never been more obvious. And its power to be at its strongest when it seems to have been overcome. It may be paralyzing, shutting down all normal processes, putting existence on stand-by. Yet it will reboot, Phillips will go to sea again, Muse will find a way to survive, to continue. And so will we. Not less fearful, but, maybe, just a tiny little bit wiser.

http://stagescreen.wordpress.com/

Gravity (2013)

The human quest

[9/10 · 25 February 2014]

The blue planet: At the beginning of Gravity, the earth moves slowly into view, inhabiting a dark, silent universe. The silence is broken by faint radio communication that gradually grows louder as a space shuttle appears, first as a dot, then slowly growing larger. It is a long, slow, quiet opening sequence that sets the stage for Alfonso Cuarón's latest film. Three astronauts are doing some repair work on the Hubble telescope, the focus is on seasoned commander Matthew Kowalsky (George Clooney) and scientist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock). The atmosphere is loose: Kowalsky tells funny stories and plays country music, Stone is focused on her work, when suddenly a Russian missile meant to destroy a disused satellite caused a chain reaction: debris from countless satellites and other objects turns into missiles destroying the shuttle and sending Kowalsky and stone on a lone quest to survive - alone in space. A nightmarish scenario and yet not one entirely implausible. Debris is more and more clogging then earth's orbit, attempts at getting rid of things in space manifold and often short-sighted. This is one theme of the film, coupled with the human hubris of controlling nature – or, in this case, the entire universe. On the other hand, Gravity is a tale of human perseverance, of the strength the will to live can instill, and also of the power of human sacrifice.

Little of this is new, yet the way Cuarón tells his story is entirely his own, even though he quotes extensively from science fiction classics such as Andrey Tarkovsky's Solaris (Clooney also starred in Stephen Soderbergh's remake) or Stanley Kubrick's 2001 – a Space Odyssey. The sense of aimless drifting, of losing control is there, as is the feeling of loneliness in a hostile infinity. As in Kubrick's masterpiece, technology is friend and foe alike, rescue and damnation employ the same instruments. It is Gravity's strength that there is no overt criticism in man's often blind belief in the value of technology, his hubris to be the master of the universe he knows. Yet it is all there: in the hypnotic imagery, the startled faces, the toy-like fragility of these technological masterpieces we have sent spinning around our planet. In all this, the human is as vulnerable as ever. When Stone reaches the assumed safe haven of the International Space Station (ISS), we see her floating in a fetal position in front of the circular airlock. This is, of course, a nod to 2001 (as is the opening sequence), but it is also a powerful image of human vulnerability. Stripped of all technological support, the human being is naked and helpless.

But it is also a rebirth: Stone, relying on training and countless gadgets, is entirely at a loss when unexpected disaster strikes. She has to battle her fears and face her demons before she can believe in a chance to survive. Sandra Bullock is impressive in her portrayal of this broken, hurt, desperate yet stubborn woman, who is, as we all are, groping along alone in eternal darkness. Her character is given her power by Kowalsky who shows her what humans are capable of doing for each other. Only then does she start believing in herself. Gravity takes much of its power from this combination of survivor story and meditatively philosophical science fiction tale. Man's hubris fails, but the will to survive remains. This is the key difference to Solaris and 2001: Cuarón chooses to believe in the human strength, in humanity's ability to change – one self and one's course on earth and within our universe.

Gravity has its very own pace, the pace of zero gravity, of floating in a vast, infinite and ultimately hostile space. A space in which the elaborate constructions humanity has built seem ridiculous, like badly made toys, which cannot protect but surely have the ability to destroy. The camera is floating along with the objects and protagonists, it moves in and out, often films the faces though their visors, then suddenly moves inside the helmet. Space is vast and unintelligible, yet for those lost in it it is a narrow, claustrophobic room as they are caught in the prison of human ambition. When – in accordance with physics – a space station explodes without a sound, this is a powerful reminder of our place in the universe.

The elementary fear and despair is always present: in the darkness of space, the cold emptiness of the technological contraptions, the clean, anti-septic images, whose polished surface reveals an unfeeling, indifferent universe – the real one as the man-made one – in which being human is impossibly hard. That it affirms the validity of trying despite the odds, is one of the film's strongest points, as is the repeated, yet never obvious reminder of what it is we have to fight for: earth's beauty is shown as vulnerable, fragile, fleeting, yet overwhelming. While the musical score is at times superfluous, the story-lines occasionally to well-composed, the ending a little far-fetched, Gravity is a powerful reminder of the possibilities and limits of human aspiration, critical of human hubris and affirmation of humanity's strength. A hypnotic, mesmerizing and ultimately hopeful film that will prove hard to forget.

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Boyhood (I) (2014)

Life - nothing else

[10/10 · 20 February 2014]

On the surface, Boyhood is just a coming of age film, not the first in Richard Linklater's career. Beneath the surface it is one of the most unusual projects in film history and easily Linklater's opus magnum. It depicts the growing up of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), a dreamy, imaginative, sensitive boy, son of a single mother without much luck when it comes to men and an easygoing though slightly irresponsible father. The unusual thing: Linklater filmed this over the span of eleven years, assembling the same cast every year. What we see is a boy of seven growing into a young man just starting college. The light narrative touch Linklater is such a master of is all there as he weaves the scenes together effortlessly into a long narrative in which time moves on naturally. Mason grows older without breaks, moves from childhood through adolescence to young adulthood. The adults, too, developed, move on, grow older, regress occasionally. The film consists of scenes depicting ordinary lives, the camera is unobtrusive, at times almost documentary- like, the music well-chosen and supportive, the narrative rhythm organic. There is some drama, charming banality, the film isn't free of clichés and stereotypes, yet it breathes life in what is a stream of living, trying to find a way, drifting along, seeking direction. In a way, everyone tries to grow up, father, mother, children. this could have been just an impressive project. As it stands, it is a true masterpiece, an entirely compelling and – though completely unsentimental – deeply moving film.

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The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Welcome to the dream factory

[8/10 · 20 February 2014]

Film is often compared to dreams, after all Hollywood us called the "dream factory", leading us into strange lands that often only exist as long as the lights are low and the projector is running. So it is only fitting that the world's largest film festival would open with an elaborate and visually overwhelming dream. Such is Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, telling the story of Zero, a lobby boy at a luxury hotel in a pre-war fantasy state who is mentored by the legendary concierge Monsieur Gustave and plunges into an epic adventure with him. The film is a brightly colored tour de force, hilariously funny, a crazy comic book world full of strange and enchanting creatures. A passing, temporary world in which one can, for a short time, live or at least imagine a dream life. Like a hotel. The visuals are astounding, the story-telling, fast-paced, inventive, always surprising, the characters quirky, grotesque, lovable. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a gigantic and excessively sweet candy floss kind of a movie full of a stellar cast on the edge of quirkiness, a wildly entertaining ride that fully exploits film's ability to create fantasy worlds that still manage to lay bare hints of the world we know. For despite all the colorfulness, the film also tells the story of a world threatened by war and violence, a dream long turned into nightmare. The Grand Budapest Hotel has its redundancies (such as the present day framing story) but it is a beautiful homage to the past we have lost but are encouraged to re- create and create anew with the greatest gift we have: imagination. And ultimately, it is a tribute to that wonderful dream machine we call cinema filled with hints and associations for those who want to find them (down to such a detail as the aspect ratio) – albeit one that doesn't take itself too seriously. Which might be its most charming and enchanting quality.

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The Monuments Men (2014)

Good night and no luck

[2/10 · 20 February 2014]

George Clooney's latest film tells a long-forgotten story: In the last phase 0of World War II, a group of art experts set up by the U.S. Army went on search for stolen and hidden art in order to rescue them from destruction or being transported to the Soviet Union. Clooney himself plays Frank Stokes, leader of these "Monuments Men", the cast includes the likes of Matt Damon, Caste Blanchett as well as, for the comic relief, Bill Murray and John Goodman. The film is strong when it comes to capturing the look of the times, whether it be occupied Paris or the battle fields of France, Belgium and Germany. This is where its strengths end. Driven by an unbearably obtrusive score, The Monuments Men is pure Hollywood at its very worst. The dialogue is bland and clichéd, the screenplay as if from a construction kit with all the dramatic turns, humorous interludes and romantic anecdotes a blockbuster needs, the photography completely unimaginative, the acting reduced to the purely routine. While the story is one that needs to be told, Clooney chooses the most unsatisfying way of telling it that could be imagined, making the film so slick and uninteresting it should not even do well at the box office.

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American Hustle (2013)

Empire of greed

[10/10 · 20 February 2014]

New York City, 1978: Irving (Christian Bale) is a con man: cunning, smart enough and aware of how far he can go. In Sydney (Amy Adams) he has found a partner who can take his efficiency to the next level. Until FBI agent Richard (Bradley Cooper) turns up and threatens to bust their lucrative fraud business. So they agree to help him catch bigger fish so he can let them go. And off goes a ride that will see politicians busted, the mafia getting involved, relationships and marriages shattered, dreams destroyed and others transformed. In David O. Russell's film, everyone cons everyone else, he unleashes such a whirlwind of greed and hubris and treachery and sheer survival instinct that not only the viewer's head starts spinning but with it the entire film. The film is set in a grotesque 1970s universe that is absurdly exaggerated as it is atmospherically true. American Hustle is human comedy and Greek tragedy, brightly colored comic strip and panoramic tableau of an era, absurd caricature and warmly colored character tale. Everything is way over the top and down to earth, wildly ridiculous and stunningly realistic at the same time, a wild and colorful feast of a film that has the addictive power – and look – of an excellent narcotic, the embarrassingly inescapable pull of an orgy that goes way too far but which one cannot stop. Christian Bale is breath-taking as Irving, overweight, full of swagger and even fuller of fear, Cooper turns the ambitious out-of-control cop into a truly scary figure, Adams walks the thin line between deep vulnerability and excessive self-confidence. But the film's true miracle is Jennifer Lawrence as Irving' wife: desperate, hysterical, full of fear and a vague longing that explodes into one of the most screwed up characters in film history. American Hustle shows – and makes the audience feel – what happens when greed, personal desires and inferiority complexes react. It is like a weird psychedelic trip that leaves you confused. And happy.

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Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Riding the bull

[8/10 · 20 February 2014]

The contrast could hardly be any greater: In the opening of Dallas Buyers Club, the viewer enters the rough macho world of American bull riding, a world inhabited unashamedly by people from the lower social strata of the "lone-star state". Next we are in a hospital: friendly, white, anti-septic, efficient. Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey) belongs to the former universe: a bull riding (although we only get to see him at that at the very end), womanizing, gambling homophobic redneck of the worst kind. Thrown into the latter environment and confronted with an HIV diagnosis, he has to try and cope with a world he doesn't know – that of the peak of the AIDS scare in 1985 – one in which he finds himself weak, facing his own death, in which he's ostracized by his former buddies and shares his fate with those he despises, such as the transsexual Rayon (Jared Leto in a rare return to what the 30 Seconds to Mars front man still does best: acting). After initial denial, Woodruff stubbornly sets out to defy the doctors' prognosis that he only has 30 days left to live. He goes to Mexico, finds alternative drugs and – back in gambling and money-making mode – starts a business selling those drugs which have not been approved by U.S. authorities yet, fighting the systems and reluctantly having to question his own beliefs.

Dallas Buyers Club is McConaughey's film. Not only did he lose over 20 kg to play the emaciated Woodruff, he becomes his character in the best possible sense. McConaughey starts out as an entirely unsympathetic and rather despicable homophobic and misogynistic man in dirty jeans and T shirt and he follows his character's development into a conscientious campaigner, savvy businessman and caring friend without entirely turning him inside out. The redneck is still there in the end, the macho, too, the swagger having become perhaps even greater. McConaughey and director Jean-Marc Vallée avoid any Saul to Paul cliché, they show a man who does what he needs to survive a little longer, whose selfishness results in helping others and ultimately something resembling compassion, whose gigantic ego enables him to fight against the odds and become a completely unlikely hero. Who has nothing heroic about him: McConaughey does not idolize Woodruff, he does not explain him – he is there, plain and simple, in all his ugliness, meanness, and prejudice. He is no saint but a fully fleshed-out human: very flawed but with an almost obscene will to live. The subtlety with which McConaughey depicts his character, the uncompromising way with which he inhabits him, carry the film and make it a convincing plea for humaneness and compassion with the conviction that it can be found anywhere and in any place. Dallas Buyers Club reminds the viewer that it is not the "good people" alone who affect change, that progress can start with anyone.

Vallée's best move was to give the film entirely to McConaughey, aided by a cast headed by Leto whose portrayal of Rayon between self-assured pride and broken despair should earn him more than the Oscar nomination he already has (as does McConaughey). Vallée focuses on Woodruff, gives him a carefully designed environment of mid-1980s shabbiness, dynamic photography that reflects the unsteadiness of this driven man, and pale washed-out colors placing him clearly in a world and time when fear brought out the worst in otherwise seemingly civilized people. The discriminatory atmosphere of U.S. society at the time is hinted at, as is the questionable role the authorities played when it came to dealing with the AIDS epidemic. If you took McConaughey out of the film, Dallas Buyers Club would at best be a very conventional and highly average drama – with him, however, this is an outstanding and memorable film about how hard and how easy it is to be human. At the end of the film, Ron finally rides a bull. In a way, he hasn't done anything else.

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The Past (2013)

The past and the present

[10/10 · 5 February 2014]

Two people at an airport: she is trying to get his attention, succeeds after several attempts, he comes over, they smile, start talking. But they cannot hear each other, remain silent, there is a massive pane between them. More than two hours later, the film will end with another scene of non-verbal communication, very differently. In-between, there is silence, people sitting at tables, riding in cars, not talking, trying not to look each other. This silence is the main character in Le Passé, the new film by Asghar Farhadi, director of the chilling divorce drama Nader and Simin. A Separation, winner of the 2011 Golden Berlin Bear and the 2012 Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film. The unsaid is all-pervasive, sabotaging the efforts of all these well-meaning, committed, loving people whose lives cross in a Paris suburb, allowing an unfinished past to poison the present.

There is a divorce again: Marie (Bérénice Béjo) and Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) meet again, four years after he left her and her two children to return to his native Teheran, in order to seal the divorce. Marie wants to marry Samir (Tahar Rahim) who has already moved in with his son Fouad (Elyes Aguis), while Marie's older daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet) wages war on her mother's new lover and the younger Léa (Jeanne Jestin) I all but forgotten. Everyone has their own secrets to conceal, secrets which have blackened the present and allow nobody to move on. As in Nader and Simin, Farhadi spins a complex tale of discovery, as in a detective story he makes Ahmad the primary agent to discover all that's been buried, all that's left unsaid.

Whereas in the earlier film, the private drama clashes with the stifling reality of today's Iran, Le Passé has no such counterpart. So the focus remains on the private: Farhadi calmly observes looks, gestures, expressions, the turning away of faces, the stiffening of bodies. There is a lot of talking, speaking that is supposed to ease the weight all seem to be suffering under, and yet communication is mostly between the words. As Marie looks at a leaving Ahmad, as Lucie desperately seeks her mother's warmth lying in a bed with her, as Samir's searching glances fill the room, the past is all over the place because nobody has set it aside.

Farhadi's story-telling is completely unassuming, he keeps his distance, the camera remains steady and almost detached. He sets a slow pace, allows the story to develop, tells chronologically and linear but the story cannot adhere to this. Almost below being noticed, the story moves from Ahmad and Marie to Fouad to Lucie to Samir. All have their stories to tell, and yet in a way it is all the same one, it is their mutual story which they only discover near the end. With all its calmness, in which even the largest outbursts, though relentless and shocking when they happen, leave little trace, have neither a cathartic nor a culminating effect, Le Passé develops a pull which becomes a surge that sweeps the viewer off their feed and into this swamp which is nothing more nor less that rather botched attempt many of us make of life. The film has an atmospheric intensity and density that at times make it hard to watch, the silent, yet kind and loving faces are haunting, the claustrophobic narrowness of the overcrowded house more than a symbol, rather a perfect setting for all the skeletons hidden in the cupboard.

In the end Asghar Farhadi has discovered most secrets but the truth remains as slippery as ever, every time one seems to get near its bottom it is revealed as an illusion. He leaves his characters to find out for themselves at which point the search for the truth can be allowed to end and the healing to start. Even when all is known, there are no simple answers, trust is needed, risks must be taken, love allowed to make decisions. The film ends on a note as sad and moving as it is full of hope. All is open, such is life and such is Le Passé. What's past is gone and yet it lingers. Letting go might be the greatest art. Asghar Farhadi doesn't show us how to do it but he does ask us to try.

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The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

The heart of brightness

[10/10 · 30 January 2014]

Trust and integrity: These are the values a TV commercial proclaims with which The Wolf of Wall Street opens, presenting a brokerage firm as a hard-working, serious, honest service provider for those who want to invest their money in an efficient and successful way. Once the commercial ends, we get a glimpse into the company as it is: the scene opens to a raucous office hosting an orgiastic party complete with dwarf tossing, sex, alcohol and more than enough drugs to last a lifetime. Based on the true story of fraudulent stock broker Jordan Belfort, the film dives deeply into the heart of what is wrong with an economy that has embraced greed as a key component of the way it works. Where J.C. Chandon's Margin Call was a cool analysis of the workings of a system that is based on no substance whatsoever and Oliver Stone's second incarnation of Wall Street is a thriller depicting the workings of personal greed, Martin Scorsese presents the economy of greed as an orgiastic and never-ending feast that devours everything else, in which money is the drug of drugs and is equivalent with success, sex, life. A parallel world following its own rules and totally disconnected with the outside world it so drastically affects.

As in his classic gangster tales, Scorsese chooses the inside perspective. And so we watch Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio in an earth- shattering performance) as he rises from small Wall street apprentice, mentored by a slick and yet charming veteran broker (perfect cliché and compelling personality: Matthew McConaughey), to the master of stock fraud, committed entirely to his firm's – and his own – prosperity, which he achieves mostly by duping investors into deals that can only have one winner: Belfort and his posse. The film's most disturbing aspect is how it commits itself to following the special logic on which this world is turning. Drawn into the vortex of success and admiring the brilliant strategy Belfort follows, the viewer only gradually understands that there is world outside, full of defrauded clients who lose their mortgages, their children's college money, their homes, their livelihoods, They never appear, yet the longer the film continues, the more their presents is felt, the more they weigh on the glamorous world of eternal success.

A world that Scorsese paints in the brightest colors: The Wolf of Wall Street is an orgiastic film portraying an orgiastic universe in which money is everything. Whether it is wild partying, boundless sex, limitless drug use or the everyday work at the office: this is a life on speed, fast-paced, constantly seeking out extreme, a permanent high which cannot afford a coming down. All is one, whether the brokers frantically call their "clients", whether they have a totally out of control orgy on a plane, discuss "dwarf tossing" in the most cynical way imaginable or turn the serious business of how to get their money abroad into a sex-filled extravaganza: sex, money, "love", drugs are all part of the same permanent rush that allows for no other reality than the one they have created themselves. Apart from DiCaprio who delivers the performance of his life, Jonah Hill impresses as Belfort's even more out of control sidekick, a virtuoso of everything extreme. There are no morals in this world and there cannot be any, only one easy answer: money is everything.

Scorsese spares no details, the film is graphic and at the same time way over the top. The story-telling as well as the visuals occasionally have a comic book touch. Realism isn't Scorsese's goal, what he tries to achieve is to convey how it must feel to live inside this bubble. This includes the danger of making it feel desirable: a trap Scorsese skillfully plays with and avoids. The more the spiral spins, the more grotesque this world becomes, the more that initial fascination is replaced with unease and ultimately disgust. The turning point is a long scene in which DiCaprio and Hill, looking for the ultimate high, descend into a hell of crawling, mumbling and completely spinning out of any remnants of self-control, a long scene lasting several minutes that will enter film history as the most uncompromising as well as imaginative and equally comical as well as devastating depiction of a drug-induced state of mind ever.

From here, it's downhill but Scorsese is smart enough not to gives us a happy or even moral ending. Despite going to jail for a few years, his Belfort is on top of the world again as a highly successful author and motivational speakers, once again pulling his old tricks. The film ends with Belfort's apparent nemesis, FBI agent Denham (Kyle Chandler) riding a New York City subway train, a dreary and totally unglamorous scene with no sense of triumph or satisfaction. The order has been restored, the gamblers rule and justice is little more than a drop in the ocean, with no effect or long-term consequence. The Wolf of Wall Street is a crazily funny comedy that ends on a quiet and bitter note, a wildly colorful yet deeply honest film that beneath the craze and behind the parallel universe it depicts conceals a stark reality that presents itself even more strongly in its absence. Yet again, Martin Scorsese has come to the core of what makes the world work and delivers yet another masterpiece.

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12 Years a Slave (2013)

One man's life

[9/10 · 26 January 2014]

12 Years a Slave, the new film by British director Steve McQueen is the latest in a series of filmic treatment of slavery, one of the darkest chapters in US history. After Quentin Tarantino's revenge tale Django Unchained and Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's political drama about slavery's official abolition, it leads us into the heart of human degradation and cruelty, and to the core of an American trauma that has not been properly dealt with in the past, that still lingers in all the unsolved issues plaguing US society today. Perhaps now the time is right. For the first time in history, a black man is holding the highest office in the land, living proof how far the country has come. A look at America today, however, shoes the long distance still ahead and maybe a film like 12 Years a Slave can serve as a reminder that the wounds that the system of treating humans as things, extending the principle of property to living souls, has created have not healed.

The film opens with a series of seemingly disconnected images: a group of slaves standing motionless in a field; a man and a woman turning towards each other in the night, a man in shackles. Not a word is spoken, past and present indistinguishable, a human life reduced to brief glimpses. 12 Years a Slave tells the true story of Solomon Northup, a father of two and skilled violinist, a respected member of the community of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. He gets lured to Washington, DC, under a pretense, is kidnapped and sold as a slave to Louisiana. He first works for a relatively humane slaver before he, following a confrontation with his chief carpenter, is sold to a brutal and sadistic new "master". Only after twelve years he can, with much luck and help from his home community, regain his freedom. A rare exception that allows him to tell a story he shares with many but which most never lived to tell.

In other directors' hands, 12 Years a Slave might have turned into a sentimental, pathos drenched melodrama, drowning in a heavy musical score, driven by high drama and overblown emotions. Steve McQueen, a rising star among Hollywood directors, however, tells the story in an equally poetic as well as serious, unsentimental, unsparing way, accompanied by a surprisingly unassuming score by Hans Zimmer, that remains close to the protagonist throughout, that sets out to tell his unique story and to reach the universal strictly through the individual. Chiwetel Ejiofor is Solomon a man robbed of his life, his identity, his name, even his right to call himself human. His acting is subtle, as he moves from defiance through pragmatic survival to all the deformations this de-humanization enforces on body and soul. He is no hero but a man who wants to live, one who tries to stay low, who even allows to become an instrument of suppression only not to be its target.

McQueen rolls past and present into one, juxtaposes strikingly beautiful images of the Southern countryside with extreme and very graphic cruelty, continues a cynical racist song into the next scene when the seemingly kind master preaches from the bible, contrasts the everyday with the inhumane as in a long scene in which Solomon, following an interrupted hanging remains for hours dangling from the rope, his feet just touching the ground and groping to keep the body up, while in the background children play. In this world, normal life and the loss of all basic principles of humaneness are one, as are beauty and the turning of humans into objects, an upside down world in which time has stopped, an eternity of suffering in which past and present are the same because there is no future. But as much as these people are forced to play their roles, they cannot help but remain humans with their very own hopes and fears and characters and personalities. An involuntary defiance that is almost harder to bear for the oppressors as outright rebellion would be. Michael Fassbender is Ejiofor's counterpart, a sadistic slaveholder with no hint of true human feelings, yet a soul even more deformed by this unnatural economy that those of his victims. The agent of terror is no free man either, tortured by demons stronger than any whip. But there is no excuse, as haunted as he is, he remains culpable without limitation.

McQueen describes without excusing. No-one gets out of this unharmed, the coming home scene in which Solomon apologizes to his wife for his appearance is starkly shocking. The film's great strength is the combination of complex and poetic storytelling and relentless honesty, making it a poem of human suffering as well as a stark and relentless portrait of what man can do to man. And he does so by telling one man's story, the tale of an individual body and soul, a flawed human being who stands for himself – and through that for millions of others.

Admittedly, the film has its faults. Brad Pitt as the only good white man is unbearably bland, occasionally the film cannot avoid the trap of drifting into tear jerking territory, and even a little patronizing is not absent – after all, Solomon's freeing is the work of white men – but these are very minor flaws in what is otherwise a deeply disturbing, uncompromisingly honest depiction of humanity at its cruelest. When the academy Awards are handed out in late February, 13 Years a Slave is widely expected to be named "Best Picture". There hasn't been a more deserving winner in years.

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Nebraska (2013)

Life in black and white

[6/10 · 21 January 2014]

Sometimes, one learns about a film's key characteristic in its first frame: a dreary highway somewhere in the American wilderness, somewhere in the outskirts of a rather non-descript town. An old man walks on it, fragile, yet doggedly ploughing on. Yes, Nebraska, the new film by Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) is a road movie. And yes, as is often the case with Payne, it is a family story. a father and son who never had much to say to each other, the younger (Will Forte) an average man with an average job and a girlfriend who just walked out on him, the elder a life-long drinker, hard, bitter, unapproachable. Of course, they will find some closeness on their journey which is a strange journey indeed: the father has received a letter proclaiming he won a million dollars, Everyone else recognizes it for what it is: a trick to sell magazine description but the father, somewhere between stubbornness and beginning dementia, refuses to accept it. Try as they may but again and again, Woody walks out to go the 750 miles to Nebraska to pick up his prize. In the end, son David relents and drives him. They stop by in his father's home town where an impromptu family reunion is staged, the assumed riches generate various desires and old conflicts alight again among the town's people before they continue on their journey, which unexpectedly ends in a little, humorous triumph.

The film turns out to be a bit of a mixed bag. It is strongest when it focuses on the family and on Woody. Bruce Dern is the real story – and the most accomplished story teller – of Nebraska. Payne gives him plenty of close-ups, and the 77-year-old pays back with interest. The black and white which Payne has chosen for his film helps to give Dern's face an out of time quality, like someone from old days long gone by, an wanderer from a world we hardly remember. How he moves from the expressionless appearance of a man who has plainly lost it, to subtle glimpses of some sort of life left in him, how his eyes convey unexpressed love, lingering regret, unsatisfied longing while the rest of his face remains immobile and seemingly dead is as breathtaking as it is done with the finest of brushes. These people, living isn't the desolate wastelands of Montana or Nebraska do not talk much, they are hardened by time of life, but there is still a residue of love – for each other, for life. There is hardly any discernible change in the (non-)relationship of Woody and David by the film's end, yet they have come many, many miles, are closer than they have ever been. and suddenly this highly dysfunctional group – the stubborn stone-like Woody, the melancholic David, the bitter and constantly complaining mother June Squibb) and the successful older brother (Bob Odenkirk), who is as vain as he is pragmatic, merge into a family unit that in the end, is all they have and they know it.

The dry, matter-of fact observational style Payne is such a master of, highlighted by those long, quiet, slow frames, with the camera repeatedly moving into the distance only to come unbearable close the next moment, is here intensified by the pale, relentless black and white, depicting a world more dead that alive, a world of aging populations and deserted houses, harvested farms and empty roads, run- down taverns and people who have nothing left to say. Payne's look is one of clinical precision, he doesn't spare us any of its ugliness and yet he finds love where it could not e expected. What has been gained on this trip is fragile, it might not even have much substance but we must believe in it because it is all that there is.

Nebraska could have been a memorable, touching, even cautiously funny film if it did not have that other level: it also tries to be a satire of greed, of narrow-mindedness, of all the vices even well-meaning people can fall victim to. The problem is that Payne turns most of his minor characters into one-dimensional caricatures, ridiculous idiots, flat characters with no redeeming features. Stacy Keach, for example, stars as Ed, former collaborator and friend of Woody's and is made to depict him as a rather ridiculous villain that is oddly out of place here. The portrayal of the extended family as slow, silent dunces is rather simplistic, too, and contrasts strangely with the subtle depiction of the protagonists. All in all, the Nebraskan town they are stuck in for two days is full of clichéd country folk with only one positive standout who in her ever-smiling goodness is even more unbearable than those lusting after a share of the assumed riches. The effect is that the black and white takes over the story and characterization for much too long, creating an odd coldness that keeps distancing us from what we see. Nebraska is two films in one which do not fit together with one of which even being a rather bad one. At the end, one wishes Alexander Payne had trusted his main characters – and his actors – a little more. They could have carried the film and there is some reason to believe they should have.

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Blue Jasmine (2013)

A real fake life

[9/10 · 14 January 2014]

Ceaselessly the woman talks at the elderly lady next to her: on the plane, at the airport, waiting for their luggage. Only when her husband picks her up, she is able to free herself from the incessant flood of words. This is how Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's latest film begins. It ends with the same woman sitting down on a park bench, talking again. The lady sitting beside her gets up and leaves, the talker does not even notice. In these two scenes – so similar and yet so different – Allen frames his tale of Jasmine whose real name is Jeanette. A woman who, married to a rich financial entrepreneur, once was at the heart of New York City's high society. Now she must relocate to San Francisco, to live with her despised sister. When her husband's criminal activities were discovered and he subsequently hung himself in his cell, she lost everything: her jewels, her money, her footing, her mental balance. This is Woody Allen's take on the financial crisis, bankers spun out of control, the Bernie Madoffs of this world.

He looks at the effects on someone who once profited from the fraudulent schemes and then fell from grace, one who so internalized the artificial world she chose to live in that now she cannot leave it. Try as she may, she cannot return to reality, moving from daydreaming escapes to the past to empty illusions about her future, unable to grasp the necessities of the life she must now live. Blue Jasmine tells the story of what happens when you live in a fake world and are thrown into the real world. It is the tragedy of a woman caught in her dream, one she cannot give up anymore. She is the victim we have a hard time pitying, the winner who loses everything while she goes on believing that everyone else is a loser around her.

Cate Blanchett is Jasmine and she gives the strongest performance to date in a career full of memorable performances. She plays Jasmine between hysteria and desperation and slowly maps her subtle descend from overwrought nervous tension into a stupor equally induced by alcohol, prescriptions drugs, self-delusions and a complete failure at getting to terms with reality. She is broke, yet flies first class, she moves in with her sister who bags groceries at a local store, yet travels with Louis Vuitton suitcases – none of this being a contradiction in her mind. Blanchett is spectacular in the radical way with which he merges with her deconstructing and dissolving character. She carries the film with her characters' helpless attempts at dignity, her ridiculous pretense, her losing any grip in her life and her mind. Sally Hawkins as her sister is a wonderful counterpart: down to earth, yet full of the same desire to have a better life, the same dissatisfaction with what she has. But while she comes around to accepting what she has, no matter how little that may be. Jasmine cannot.

Allen moves back and forth between the present and flashbacks of the past, often caused by a sudden memory or the topic of a conversation. Strangely, it is those past scenes that feel more real. Whereas the dreary present is drenched in a pale, vague sunny light, giving it a slightly unreal, dream like feel, corresponding well with the nostalgic jazz soundtrack Allen has chosen, the memories seem sharper, more matter of fact, more plausible. This reflects Jasmine's perception: for her the fake is the real and the real a nightmare she must wake up from. And it seems she might: love enters, a chance to resume the life she once had and for a short time, the old socialite returns, the façade though a little cracked is polished and looks as good as new. But all falls apart again, and night falls on Jasmine.

Blue Jasmine is Woody Allen's first drama in a long time. Although he does, at times, allow his portrait of Jasmine to touch on the caricaturesque, the film remains too close to her existential desperation to allow for cathartic laughter. Instead the film, despite the essentially unlikable title character, is a touching story about the delusion of those who believe in the fake, who build their lives on dreams and self-deception, who invent a life so thoroughly that they come to believe in it. And it shows a society built on the principle of make belief – and the willingness of many to defy logic for the blind faith in the god of money. Yes, some of the plot twists are a little implausible, yes, the contrast between the phony rich and the ultimately good-hearted poor, is a little simplistic, but overall Blue Jasmine is an entirely convincing study of the dissolution of a self, carried by a focused direction and an acting performance that is great beyond belief, making this Woody Allen's strongest film in a long time.

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Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)

The Poetry of Life

[10/10 · 4 January 2014]

Faces in close-up, a chance meeting in a crowded square, eyes meet, hang on for a second, part again. Except from Adèle's: she turns around, tries to make the moment linger, cannot move on. Before this, at the start of the film, we have watched Adèle's class read from Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne, the passage about love at first sight, about being stricken with someone like never before. And so La Vie d'Adèle begins. In Marivaux's novel, the love will not survive, defeated by differences in class. Something similar will happen here, but what happens along the way and how it happens, is one of film's greatest miracles in recent years.

For three hours, director Abdellatif Kechiche follows Adèle as she moves from teenager to young adult, as she meets, falls in love, lives with and is left by Emma, a blue-haired artist a few years older. La Vie d'Adèle takes its time, the first scene in which students read from a book lasts for minutes, the lovers' first sex is seven minutes long. The film consists of episodes, laconically following each other, sometimes there are minutes between them, at others several years. There is an over ten minute spell in the middle – marking the blossoming of their love – in which not a word is spoken, several drawn out and very explicit sex scenes. As slow as its pace is, as long the periods in which nothing much happens, La Vie d'Adèle is never boring, not for a moment, and it isn't a second too long.

Instead, it develops its own rhythm, like a long, drawn out poem, it creates its own time in which years are seconds and seconds years. Scene follows scene, one after the other, point after point. There is no artificial flow creation – it happens naturally as we go along. Because, if this is a poem with a lyrical rhythm of its own, it is the poem of life and love, its pace that in which life happens – or doesn't. La Vie d'Adèle is the story of a girl becoming a young woman, yet it is far from being a coming of age tale. Also, this is not about a young Lesbian, just a young woman trying to find herself. The film does not shun the subject of homosexuality and society's acceptance of it, but it is not a topical film. It is part of life and here, life writes the script.

First and foremost, this is film of faces. Almost the entire film is done in close-ups. Occasionally it leaves the face, goes to hands, breasts, thighs, moves along with the protagonist's glance only to return. La Vie d'Adèle comes as close as it gets – to its characters' bodies, to their innermost selves, to us. The explicit sex is just part of this deal, it holds back nothing and yet it leaves so much to the viewer. For nothing is spelt out, all is in those bodies and faces, mostly Adèle's. Adèle Exarchopulos plays this open-mouthed and wide-eyed average girl with all the openness and closeness of youth. Her face reveals and conceals at the same time. As she tries the conventional sex with boys lifestyle, gets confronted by her friends, gives in to love, clings to it and wanders aimlessly to a life missing its meaning, we watch her. Everything: the fear and love, the insecurity and confidence, the happiness and desperation happens right there. The same is true for Léa Seydoux who plays Emma, a more confident, outgoing but equally vulnerable counterpart.

Everything is subtle. The falling in love just happens and so does its end. When it does there is no run-up to it, it comes right at the moment with a devastating force that hurts. Yet, life goes on while it doesn't. Adèle's face becomes aimless, questioning, wondering. The growing conflicts are hinted at and all in the faces that drift apart, the looks that meet each other less and less, that grow asymmetrical – when one looks longingly, the other is occupied by something else. The girl who wants to be a teacher and the ambitious artist, one from a family whose signature dish is Spaghetti Bolognese, the other used to eating oysters, they fit and don't fit, they complement each other but remain worlds apart. Attraction and distance are again conveyed in ways of looking, in facial expressions, positions of bodies towards each other.

La Vie d'Adèle is a miracle. A long poem with a pace and rhythm and visual language all its own, a story written in and by faces and bodies and looks. It moves along effortlessly, in a matter of fact way that needs no dramatization, no elaborate editing, no music or track shots. As we watch its characters look at each other, themselves, life, it also just looks. and in that look, the look of life, of love maybe, is the story of a girl's search for herself, of finding and losing, of growing up without even trying. A search that might not be entirely successful and one that certainly doesn't end. The story of life. Nothing more.

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The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

A human journey

[8/10 · 4 January 2014]

And so the journey continues. With The Desolation of Smaug, Peter Jackson has now presented the middle part of his trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. A difficult task as it has to serve as a bridge between the beginning and the end of the story but also be capable of standing on its own. In his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson decided to narrow the view, focus on key episodes and thus offer a contrast from the panoramic vision of parts one and three. Still, The Two Towers was arguably the weakest installment of the series. This time, Jackson again departs from the style and focus of the first part: Whereas there he adopted a much slower pace, allowed scenes to play out for as long as they could and chose a much more comical as well as fairy-tale like tone, he now gets down to business. The Desolation of Smaug is faster, narratively tighter and way more serious than An Unexpected Journey. Thus, it is much closer to The Lord of the Rings.

As it is meant to be. Much more so than I the first part, Jackson adds characters and story lines not in the book that serve one purpose mostly: embed the adventure tale in a darker, larger one, an approaching battle of good and evil. So the film basically tells two stories: that of the company of dwarfs and a hobbit to reclaim the old dwarf kingdom from a dragon and the buildup to the events of the earlier trilogy. For much of the film the two strands run parallel to each other, but Jackson succeeds, as it goes on, to atmospherically intertwine them, lifting the adventure tale to a battle in a much bigger war. This does not go without some arm twisting and results in a not entirely consistent film but it works better and better as it progresses, suddenly infusing the smaller story with an importance it might not have had before.

As the tale gets more serious, so do the characters, first and foremost hobbit Bilbo, played by Martin Freeman. His is a true coming-of-age story (despite his advanced age), enfolding like a Bildungsroman. It is fascinating to watch Freeman subtly add muscle and courage to his character, augment the comfort-loving Bilbo with a maturity he did not have in the first firm. For this is still a story of the most unlikely of heroes, a – literally – little man rising to the stature he needs to make himself and those in his charge survive. The darker the surroundings, the brighter his light shines and the more he can inspire those around him. Jackson's strength lies in creating three-dimensional characters in just a few sketches – and Freeman is the perfect actor to achieve this.

Sure, not everything works out. Such as the addition of the elvish woman Tauriel and her love story with dwarf Kili. This adds little to an otherwise very tightly-knit narrative, threatening to derail it occasionally. On the other hand, Jackson's obvious love for the powers of the current generation of CGI is less pervasive here. The visual effects are mind-boggling again, but they serve the story. Easily Jackson moves from place to place, episode to episode without any sense of the fragmentary. There is a wholeness to this that the first part lacked, everything belongs together, woven delicately into a rich and fascinating texture. Far from being a stretch, embedding the tale into what is basically the eternal struggle of life, to live and make sense of it, makes the film stronger and the individual journey at its hard even stronger. For this is what the film is: a tale of human perseverance, far from naïve but not without optimism. This way, The Hobbit becomes a parable of human life. And a convincing one, too.

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Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Don Quixote with a guitar

[10/10 · 17 December 2013]

No doubt: Llewyn Davis is a loser. First, his career as a folk singer is going badly: his duet partner committed suicide, his record isn't selling, he makes so little that he cannot afford his own apartment but has to move from friend to friend, or rather from acquaintance to acquaintance. Secondly, as far as human relationships are concerned, he is a total failure. His ex girlfriend despises him, one of her predecessors faked an abortion to have him out of her – and the mutual child's life – people who are sympathetic to him, get a rather rude treatment on a daily basis. After A Serious Man, the Coen brothers have again chosen to depict a man on the wrong side of luck. Only this time, one might say he deserves it. Or maybe not, for he has one redeeming feature. The film opens with a long scene in which Davis (Oscar Isaac) performs a sad old folk song. The camera gently hovers around him, catches the hushed, intensely attentive atmosphere of the smoky basement club, while he sucks his audience – us – into the dark, sorrowful world he creates in his song, hinting at a depth he so often will not show in "real life". It is this contrast, the dialogue between the sadly funny tale of a modern Don Quixote and that other, older, tenderer story, the music tells. For as much as this is Llewyn's story, it also is that of the redeeming power of music. For even if Davis is the same at the end as the story comes full circle and returns to its opening, as he once again gets beaten up and is succeeded on stage by a young, cocky folk singer with a nasal voice who will soon change music – and not just folk music – forever, there is just the tiniest hint that this Llewyn Davis might have some sort of promise after all, maybe not as a successful singer, but as a human being. Inside Llewyn Davis is inspired loosely by the story of Dave van Ronk, a star of the Greenwich Village folk scene around the time of Bob Dylan's arrival there in 1961. Dylan learned a lot from van Ronk and stole some of his most promising songs, but that is a story to be told another day. This one is about a man lost in a world that hasn't been waiting for him, who has a mission that is entirely his own. The lengths to which he goes to show the world he doesn't care are astounding. And yet he craves love. Oscar Isaac is a miracle: even in his most repelling state, in his most rejecting attitude, there is a flicker of sad longing in his face, his eyes, a face the Coens show us much of. It is one you need to dive into, closed to the casual observer but hiding so much pain and uncertainty and desire to live one sometimes thinks it must explode. The Coens' cinema is one of subtlety, of nuanced, of shades of grey between the black and white. In Isaac, they have found their perfect actor, heading a stellar cast including Carey Mulligan, John Goodman and Justin Timberlake. As so often, the Coen brothers are masters at creating an atmosphere, a universe of its own, unique as well as absolutely consistent. It is a world of the night, in which grey shades reign, days are pale and dust is everywhere. Even in the open there is a sense of narrowness, of tight spaces, lightless basements that are cage and protective space in one. It is the tiny holes that provide the only rooms for creativity, for the soul to speak. And so it is that the dark world of the underground gradually regains some warmth and coziness, the dark becomes a zone of comfort, while everything else becomes cold and distant. Having said all this, Inside Llewyn Davis is first and foremost a comedy in the Coenesque sense of the term. It is a Quixotic tale full of quirky characters at time bordering on the fairy-tale like – especially true for the sequence around Goodman's character, a trodden-down mixture of villain and clown that calls up associations of the expressionist nightmare world of their earlier film Barton Fink. The other foot of the film is firmly on the ground, in the existential struggle of a man the world won't welcome. But there is still that third element: music, that timeless realm of love and pain and suffering and hope. It is here the film is anchored, it is here this Don Quixote conquers his windmills, armed solely with his guitar. It is here it all comes together. Tragedy, comedy, fairy tale, social drama, held together by the softest of touches. Another Coen brothers masterpiece. What else could be expected?

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

Between hope and fear

[8/10 · 5 December 2013]

The Hunger Games, the first installment of a series of film adaptations of Suzanne Collins' novel trilogy, was one of the surprises of the film year 2012. The Gary Ross directed film combined blockbuster appeal with sharp and uncompromising social analysis painting a clear picture of the mechanisms of totalitarianism, combined with sharp media criticism. In the story of the young girl participating in a cynical game in which children and teenagers slaughter each other until only one survives, the film envisioned a dystopia that combined insights into totalitarian systems with popular forms of media entertainment such as reality TV and casting shows that served to show how closely the perverted lust of seeing people exposed and the collective cruelty of a suppressive state are aligned. The majority, that concept on which democratic society is built, here appeared in all the dark side it also possesses. It is the individual, the thinking, feeling and conscientious human who is the only source of hope, the individual who in turn can be the root of a new, hopefully better majority.

The series' second installment, entitled Catching Fire picks up where part one ended. In an act of defiance, the film's hero, Katniss tricked the system into allowing herself as well as her friend Peeta to win the games together, Torn between feelings of guilt about having killed, the pressure of society and the demands of a rising rebellious spirit, Katniss must continue to find her way while she still has not finished growing up. Catching Fire, directed by Francis Lawrence, remains close to the visual style and story-telling technique of its predecessor. The focus remains on Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. Close-ups of her, moving from face to hands to fragments of her body, representing a more and more fragmented soul, still provide the key visual technique of the film. Lawrence is an actress who can condense complex inner struggles, difficult decision making processes and battles between hope and fear, defiance and desperation into a single look, into minimal changes of expression, into tiny movements, the clenching of a fist, a sudden rigidity in her body. The film makes ample use of this as it focuses on the inner fight of the protagonist.

For Catching Fire moves its perspective much more inside the individual than the first part did. The mechanisms that allow a totalitarian system to work and also the deformations it causes are concentrated in the individual self. This is true for the first part in which Katniss tries to come to terms with who she is expected to be and the choices she has to conform to the demands of one side or the other. But it remains true later on when again she is sent into the arena to fight for her life, a fight that ends in a much different twist as the revolution finally begins. Here Catching Fire is as adept at fulfilling all demands on action-packed entertainment while never losing its focus. As close as the camera remains on her and her comrades, as close remains the perspective on the specific human cost of totalitarianism.

The biting media satire is as sharp as in the first film, the contrasts between a decadent ruling class and the suppressed majority are depicted even more sharply and relentlessly. While the amount of killing scenes is reduced, there is no softening of the uncompromising starkness with which human suffering is being presented. The film's only weakness might be that the price of focusing on the protagonists is that the characterization of the characters further to the fringe is somewhat sketchier. This however is compensated by an even more stellar cast including memorable performances by Jeffrey Wright, Amanda Plummer and the scarily indecipherable Philip Seymour Hoffman as the new head game maker. Jennifer Lawrence once again proves to be a rare talent, Woody Harrelson as her mentor impresses once more and Josh Hutcherson really come into his own as the dignified, honest and relentlessly fighting Peeta, Katniss' reasonable counterpart.

More than its predecessor, Catching Fire is conceived as part of a series. It reduces the explanation of what happened before to a minimum and ends with a true cliffhanger. This, however, does not take anything away from the film's quality. Catching Fire marries blockbuster spectacle with intelligent soul searching, biting satire with psychological drama, entertainment with a serious message. As the first installment, it proves that giving an audience what they want and getting them to think and reflect are not mutually exclusive. The third book will be split into two films, again directed by Lawrence. It is to be hoped that they will share all that made the first two films such compelling and outstanding film making.

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Frances Ha (2012)

The Undatable Woman

[7/10 · 29 July 2013]

Frances is twenty seven and drifting through life. Her dancing career doesn't take off, she clings to her best friend unaware that she is ready to move on, makes her boyfriend break up with her and stumbles from one unstable environment to another. She is silly and childish and unreliable, a woman refusing or unable to grow up when all around her do. She has no aim, no goal, but loads of insecurity and doubts. She is obnoxious, annoying, clumsy, but also charming much in the way a child would be. She also isn't looking too bad which helps. A young woman at a crossroads, unsure what to do with hr life – not an entirely new subject. Director Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig who plays Frances wrote the script for Frances Ha together – and they have managed, as writers, director and actress, to turn and old story into a humorous, touching and imaginative tale about how hard it can be to grow up when all you want to do is live but don't know how.

The film is shot in black and white which gives it a sense of distance, like a wondrous tale from long ago. at the same time it has an impressionistic feel: with its fast-paced almost fragmentary sequences of fleeting moments, its jumping in and out of Frances' life without explaining or narrating the periods in-between, its use of music which can highlight emotional peaks, serve as ironic counterpoints or give the scene an almost fairy-tale touch. It is a series of moments, the fragments, a life consists of, and a collection of places. Places she lives at or visits, a topography of someone without a clear direction. The turning points are not of the most original sort – the friend moving on to a more steady life and an engagement, her career stalling – yet, Frances Ha has a directness and a very unique rhythm that keep them fresh and, one could say real. This is at least partly the fault of Gerwig whose portrayal of this drifter is entirely believable and at the same time just a notch over the top to make it humorous and install a very fine sense of irony into the story of this "undatable" (as goes a running gag) woman.

Frances Ha will not go down in film history, it is after all, first and foremost, a lightly entertaining film with what could be called an optimistic if not a happy ending as Frances finally finds a sense of direction and a purpose in life. However, with its very own rhythm and cinematographic language, its distancing black and white and its captivating protagonist, Baumbach's latest film is a consistent and rather different take on the old subgenre of the coming of age film: very enjoyable, at times moving, always engaging and not all that easily forgettable. Which is no small feat.

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Child's Pose (2013)

No Child Play

[10/10 · 4 June 2013]

What would you do if your only son caused an accident in which a 14- year-old-boy died? For Cornelia, a successful Bucharest architect, the answer is clear: she'll fight and she's willing to do everything it takes to keep her son out of prison. At this year's Berlin Film Festival, Child's Pose was the consensus winner of the Golden Bear, the festival's award for the best film. In it, director Calin Peter Netzer portrays an overbearing mother and a member of Romania's upper classes, for whom she and her sense of family come first and then there is nothing for a very long time.At the same time, Child's Pose provides a chilling glimpse into a society in which everything can be managed if you know the right people and have sufficient amounts of money. With its in-your-face documentary-like style dominated by the hand-held camera which is always close but also still and distant enough to allow the viewer long looks into those faces, particularly that of Luminita Gheorghiu's Cornelia. Everything that needs be known is in this face: the hardness, the lack of compassion of a society in which the stronger always wins, the longing for a closeness this world and the laws governing it no longer allow, the scars it leaves.

Cornelia is a control freak. In the beginning we see her interrogating her janitor Clara who also cleans her son's apartment. Matter-of-factly but with an almost diabolical determination that borders on the obsessive. When, for minutes on end we see her ploughing through her son's apartment, her loneliness, her isolation and her compensation through the stifling grip she keeps on her son become almost unbearable. This is also true later when she is left alone, motionless and helpless, in her spotless kitchen, a glass of Grand Marnier being her only companion. But then immediately she becomes the efficient, unscrupulous organizer who calmly persuades her son to change his testimony, coerces a witness into co-operating, uses her connections to smooth things regardless of the victims. When, at the very end, tears roll as she tries to convince the boy's family to drop charges, the question how much of this is real and if it is, who is she crying for, has become unsolvable.

But Cornelia is no monster: the scariest part of the film is how perfectly she fits into this world, how acceptable all that she does is: to her husband, her friends, even the police. If her son rebels, it is against her overbearing nature, not her questionable tactics. This son, too, is a scarred individual, a selfish loner who needs to be if not at the center of attention than at least at the center of his world. Bogdan Dumitrache plays this Barbu as a childish, weak, hostile, cowardly man who is way too similar to his mother for his own good, product and symbol of a society in which money can buy you anything. Child's Pose shows how a corrupt world that has lost its balance and its center deform those who live in it, particularly, those who think they rule it, those who built t in the first place. But there is hope: in the quiet dignity of the boy's parents and maybe even in that quietly improvised gesture Barbu musters up in the end and which we watch from a distance, from inside a car. A small hint of an ultimate emancipation, a tiny act of growing up, almost imperceptible, but even more earth- shattering for it.

Child's Pose is a relentlessly honest film that keeps us watching when we want to turn our eyes away, that provides an unfiltered, direct, in- your-face perspective on a world so shiny on the surface and so hollow beneath. And it is a chilling portrait of people struggling and failing to avoid loneliness, longing for each other, but drifting apart the more they're clinging to the other. Calin Peter Netzer's naturalistic style is far from heavy, it never imposes itself on the film, it forces us to keep looking, to stay close to this woman fighting like a lioness for her child while overstepping all lines of what we might call morality, asking us what we would do, where our limits are and how much we'd weigh morals when all we care about is at stake. This Cornelia is so far and so near at the same time. A chilling, moving film not at all easy to forget.

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