Tag: Adam Driver

Screening Room: ‘Megalopolis’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

My review of the long awaited Megalopolis ran at PopMatters:

About an hour and a half into Francis Ford Coppola’s sometimes jaw-dropping and frequently interminable Megalopolis, the sometimes astounding and frequently inscrutable filmmaker finally delivers a scene that seems worthy of the film he seems to believe he is making. During a tense meal with his political rival and future father-in-law Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), visionary city planner Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) makes a passionate argument for the need to create a better world, only to have Cicero sharply retort about how every utopia carries with it a potential dystopia. For good measure, Cicero’s daughter and Cesar’s love Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) jumps in to make her father’s point with some deftly delivered Marcus Aurelius quotes.

For about a minute, Megalopolis crackles to life with the clarity it has been missing. But soon, the moment is past, and Coppola is back to jumbling together messily overproduced spectacle moments, which add up to far less than the sum of their portentous bits…

Megalopolis opens this weekend. If you’re going, it’s worth springing for the IMAX.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘White Noise’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, Film - NewLeave a comment

Many have said that Don DeLillo’s White Noise is an unfilmmable novel. Well, it’s a film with Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, and even a killer LCD Soundsystem-scored dance number.

White Noise is playing now in limited release. It will be on Netflix December 30. My review is at PopMatters:

Pity the person asking what White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s messy yet fun adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel of comic catastrophe and looming portents, is about. The response may take time to compose, arrive in paragraph form, involve contemplative gazing, and include the phrase “it’s about … America.” Such an answer may drive the potential viewer towards something starring Ryan Reynolds. This is a shame…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Last Duel’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Film - NewLeave a comment

Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Erik Jager’s nonfiction book The Last Duel is, well, far more than another medieval jousting movie.

The Last Duel opens this Friday. My review is at Slant:

…a film that’s not only set during the Hundred Years’ War and turns on an abstruse question of jurisprudence, but also features multiple Rashomon-esque takes on an inciting event and a blond Ben Affleck chewing scenery with Klaus Kinski-like gusto, might sound doomed to failure. But against all odds, it turns out to be a smartly acted and insightfully written look at how the intersection of power, greed, superstition, and vanity can warp and obscure even the most brutally obvious crime…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Paterson’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards, Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment

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One of the most surprising and rewarding movie treats of 2016 is Jim Jarmusch’s quirky yet heartfelt Paterson, about a poetry-writing bus driver in New Jersey. It reminds you not just how great Jarmusch can be but renews your faith in a particular brand of American independent filmmaking.

Paterson is playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

Proudly reinforcing the at-times under-siege notion that there is great, grasping life yet in American filmmaking, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is a simple story told with power, complexity and vision. Like many of the Frank O’Hara or William Carlos Williams poems that the film’s namesake protagonist (Adam Driver) reads and re-reads, the film is a poignant portrait of the mundane, a singing symphony of the everyday. It’s also a comedy, a romance, a paean to American post-industrial resilience, and a sublimely enjoyable work of art about a bus driver who writes poems that he doesn’t seem to care if anybody ever reads. There’s a lot here, folded like tightly coiled wires under the seemingly placid surface…

Here’s the trailer.

Screening Room: ‘Silence’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - Awards, Film - New1 Comment

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A spiritual epic of the kind he hasn’t tried since Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese’s Silence is playing now in limited release and should be expanding nationwide soon. My review is at PopMatters:

…with his long-gestating adaptation of Shūsaku Endō‘s 1966 novel Silence, Scorsese returns to a scenario where souls are lost and seeking answers. Set in 17th-century Japan, a world distant from his usual contemporary American settings, the movie presents characters who willingly undertake punishments as brutal as anything experienced by the great martyrs of his early work, from Jake LaMotta to Jesus Christ…

Here’s the trailer.

New in Theaters: ‘While We’re Young’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts in 'While We're Young' (A24)
Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts contemplate their oldness in ‘While We’re Young’ (A24)

Noah Baumbach continues his filmic project with Ben Stiller on the agitations of middle age and disappointment in While We’re Young, playing now in limited release.

My review is at Film Racket:

Age is wasted on the old, especially when they want to be young again. When Noah Baumbach’s hit-and-miss comedy of urbane humiliation catches up with Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), they are stuck dead in middle age nowhere without a road map. A long-married couple doubting their comfortable but deadened relationship, they emphatically reassure themselves of their contentment. They don’t need kids to be happy, they tell each other, saying they are free to jet off to Europe at a moment’s notice. Well, probably not that soon. Maybe a month…

Here’s the trailer: