Dunkirk
As he's so masterly done since his debut feature almost twenty years ago, Christopher Nolan's penchant for the manipulation of time features prominently in his WWII feature, "Dunkirk". Literally suspending the rigors of war across three distinct and overlapping timelines (land, sea and air), it's a technical gambit that, in other hands, could be problematic. However, in Nolan's radical conceptualization, "Dunkirk" is essentially a silent film with sporadic bursts of dialogue that imposes the idea of time being the strictest enemy against his relatively anonymous cast of men desperately running away (and towards) the waning vestiges of combat. Refusing to carve out a central figure of empathy (although Tom Hardy's ace fighter pilot comes the closest thing to a hero the film has, including a momentous bow), "Dunkirk" is even more radical for the way it drops us in the midst of war and allows us to experience the waves of anger, desperation, intelligence, cowardice and loyalty that ebbs and flows over its young men facing a dark hour of the war. I find this more honest and revealing than so many other war films that impose a facade of heroism on its characters. In a war that spanned so many years and re-wrote both the internal and external geography of so many men, women and landscapes, "Dunkirk" feels all the more courageous.
Atomic Blonde
Suckered into this twisty, fluorescent thriller because of the trailers featuring a butt kicking Charlize Theron is just one of the many pleasures of David Leitch's "Atomic Blonde". Technically, the film is pretty spectacular. And if spy thrillers derived from a pulpy graphic novel featuring the skulduggery of Berlin's waning Cold war days, then its even better. Highly enjoyable.
A Ghost Story
As a David Lowery devotee- from his early experimental short films to the languid, country-fried fatal romanticism of his masterpiece "Ain't Them Bodies Saints"- I've willfully absorbed everything he's done. Yet, with his latest film "A Ghost Story", he leaves me wanting for the first time. When it focuses on the patient yearning between young couple Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, it soars. Watch as Mara listens to Dark Rooms "I Get Overwhelmed" and the way her eyes and face subtly hold back the ruptures of emotion that threaten to overtake her. When the film wanders into a ponderous meditation on time and the residual emotions of those left behind (i.e. the now infamous image of Casey Affleck wearing a bed sheet with holes for the eyes), it becomes woefully pretentious and strained. I understand the grand gestures filmmaker Lowery was reaching for, but it mostly left me cold.
First Kill
Low grade thriller with Bruce Willis. At the very least, it's one of the better things director Steven Miller has done. Full thoughts at Dallas Film Now
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