The new movie from Sally Potter (Orlando) is a quick-witted chamber piece starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Clarkson, and Timothy Spall, among others. It’s playing now in limited release and absolutely worth seeking out.
…from the first flash-forward appearance of a frazzled Kristin Scott Thomas brandishing a pistol through the onion-skin layering of the initially celebratory and ultimately catastrophic dinner party that follows, this is a high-spirited black comedy with a crackling, biting energy…
Ryan Gosling, staring his way through ‘Only God Forgives’
Two years ago, Nicolas Winding Refn blew some people away with Drive, his mannered homage to 1980s’ crime films. Starring Ryan Gosling as a stoic getaway car driver, it didn’t have much of a story, but the cool and moody style was something to behold. Refn and Gosling’s blood-soaked, Bangkok-set followup, Only God Forgives, takes the impulses of that earlier film and pursues them to the nth degree; it may as well be a silent for the lack of dialogue.
Only God Forgives opens tomorrow in limited release. My full review is at Film Racket:
Ryan Gosling doesn’t say much in his second collaboration with Drive filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn. He’s busy looking into the middle distance like a wounded child and occasionally erupting into violence. “Wanna fight?” is about the extent of his verbal skills. For all his cut-from-granite movements and dead-eyed staring, he may as well be Jean-Claude Van Damme. Of course, if played by the Muscles from Brussels, Gosling’s character might have gotten out of a few of the scrapes that leave him looking like a pit bull’s chew toy by the end of this slow-motion surrealist horrorshow dressed up like an arthouse crime story…
In Francois Ozon’s pitch-perfect comedy In the House, a cynical schoolteacher who’s also a failed writer becomes obsessed with a student’s supposedly autobiographical essays about stalking a friend’s family. It’s a sharp piece of work, knowing and cynical without being obvious, and possibly too smart for its own good.
Chris Barsanti 
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