The Current Cinema 17.2

The Great Wall

I have a weakness for the late period Zhang Yimou films derided by most everyone else. While lukewarm on "Coming Home", I found his 2012 Christian Bale-missionary-stuck-in-war-torn-China "Flowers of War" an especially immersive and moving marvel. The same can be said for his latest project, "The Great Wall", again starring a Hollywood star (Matt Damon) who manages to save most of China. This time it's not marauding Japanese soldiers, but marauding creatures that bellow out from underneath a magical mountain every 60 years and do battle with humans. Yes, its preposterous, but its also an extravagant and visually stunning effort that features an unending number of imaginative moments calculated to shock and awe. Yimou's roving camera, his mise-en-scene within heavily crafted CGI backdrops and his fetishistic use of color are magnetic technical attributes that save the film from being yet another internationally produced Game of Thrones knock-off hoping to recoup its assets overseas... and then score whatever bonus it can with American audiences. It's spectacle, but its a glorious one.


A Cure For Wellness

Overblown in its length and overwrought in its trippy representation of madness and Lynchian weirdness, Gore Verbinski's "A Cure For Wellness" is a vacant ploy of commercialism masquerading as avant garde. And if the carefully composed images don't stir the feeling, then its narrative about a New York finance employee going to a mysterious Swiss sanitarium to bring back one of his firm's head honchos certainly doesn't move the needle either. As the employee chosen for this mind-bending mission, yet another misstep is Dane DeHaan, portraying our protagonist with about as much magnetism as the cold marble walls and floors ever present in the hospital. From top to bottom, "A Cure For Wellness" is an unpleasant, dour and alienating effort.


Bitter Harvest

Manages to wrap a tepid and forgettable love story around a moment in history that should be anything but tepid and forgettable.  Full review on Dallas Film Now.


The Salesman


Oscar winning Farhadi film again! One of the very best of the year so far. Review at Dallas Film Now.