Elvis Presley is ostensibly the subject of The King (2018), Eugene Jarecki’s rambling road movie of a documentary. The award-winning director drives Presley’s 1963 Rolls-Royce across the US, from Mississippi and Memphis to Nashville, New York, Las Vegas, Hollywood, and elsewhere, talking to historians, musicians, members of Presley’s inner circle, and everyday Americans. Elvis centers […]
Anyone who has followed the career of Paul Schrader could fall into the trap of simply cataloguing the ways in which First Reformed (2018) is a summation of his themes and inspirations. Imagine the promotional possibilities: “From the author of “Transcendental Cinema” and “Notes on Film Noir” and the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and The Last […]
“There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?” The opening line of Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War (2005) captures the film in a phrase: it’s serious, it’s sardonic, and it has both a […]
This is not your father’s Hamlet (2000). This melancholy Dane is son of the deceased Chairman of Denmark Corporation. His castle is a sleek but alienating New York high rise dotted with omnipresent surveillance cameras, his kingdom city streets lined with paparazzi and tabloid reporters. Ethan Hawke is the youngest actor to tackle the role […]
Predestination (2015) is a generic title for a perversely clever time travel tale but you can understand why The Spierig Brothers, the screen credit for filmmaking team Michael and Peter Spierig, didn’t go with the title of the famous Robert Heinlein short story they adapted. “—All You Zombies—” would give audiences the wrong idea. There […]
Before Midnight (2013), the third chapter in the story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), finds the lovers together in Europe, raising daughters of their own, and still talking about love and art and desires and compromises. We’re on vacation in Greece and the two are hoping to rekindle a little of their […]
Good Kill (2015) tackles writer / director Andrew Niccol’s favorite theme: the intersection of technology and humanity. His problem is that his art is rarely as interesting as his ideas. The Truman Show works because Peter Weir is very good with the human equation, and Gattaca, to date, is Niccol’s most successful film, in part […]
It’s common knowledge that filmmaker Richard Linklater and his four central actors—Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as the parents, Lorelei Linklater (the director’s daughter) as the older sister, and Ellar Coltrane as Mason, a six-year-old boy as the film begins—shot Boyhood (2014) over the course of 12 years to watch not just Mason but everyone […]
Training Day (2001) earned Denzel Washington an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as a corrupt narcotics cop. In part it’s because he’s playing against type: Denzel earned his reputation as Hollywood’s bedrock of decency and morality: his screen heroes fight fear, prejudice, and self-doubt for their goodness. Detective Alonzo Harris proved that the […]
