Tag: Michael Shannon

TV Room: ‘Fahrenheit 451’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, TelevisionLeave a comment
Michael B. Jordan in ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (HBO)

Indie director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo, 99 Homes) takes a detour into the land of splashy classic literature adaptations with his take on the great Fahrenheit 451, which premieres on HBO this Saturday.

My review is at The Playlist:

There’s a lot left out in this noisy and luridly shot but thin adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel. A prescient fable about the death of the imagination and individuality in the postwar war, it imagines a world where the houses have all been fireproofed and firemen race through nighttime streets looking for books to burn..

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Shape of Water’

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

A nearly sure-fire debt for some awards in both acting and design categories is Guillermo del Toro’s ravishing fairy-tale romance The Shape of Water, which is playing in theaters now.

My review is at PopMatters:

The Shape of Water is ostensibly a love story between a solitary woman and a merman. But the true object of the movie’s affection is its star character, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), and rightly so. Elisa is just about the fiercest woman on screen right now; a less complicated but no less determined heroine than Frances McDormand’s blowtorch vigilante Mildred in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. A mute cleaning woman who lives above a grand old movie palace, she has a closely-followed a litany of daily habits that are treated more like chiming celebrations than rote compulsiveness…

Screening Room: ‘Midnight Special’

On By chrisbarsantiIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

midnight special1

Midnight Special, the new film from Jeff Nichols (Mud, the upcoming Loving), opened this past weekend. My review is at Eyes Wide Open:

There’s nothing more American than a chase scene. That’s one of the reasons that, looking back on Jeff Nichols’s somber science-fiction thriller Midnight Special, it’s the moments of movement and noise that come to mind. The dark Texas and Louisiana highways, an old Detroit beater with its deeply thrumming engine, the hushed sentinel lines of trees on either side, the man at the wheel driving with the lights off and night-vision goggles on, the special cargo in the back seat wearing protective goggles and reading comic books by flashlight. All the great and terrifying forces of post-millennial America are gathering in the night and searching for them: an alphabet soup of government agencies, breaking-news television with its Amber alerts, and an end-times sect convinced that they have found their messiah…

Here’s the trailer:

New in Theaters: ‘The Iceman’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment
theiceman1
Michael Shannon plays ‘The Iceman’

iceman_posterRichard Kuklinski was a hitman for a branch of the New Jersey mob up through the 1980s, though he also had a sideline in killing for his own pursuits or just plain kicks. In one of the more obvious casting choices ever, Michael Shannon plays Kuklinski as a stone-faced monolith in The Iceman, a film that might be based on true events but feels as false as a dozen other mob flick knockoffs (complete with energetic but wasted Ray Liotta performance) from the past couple decades.

The Iceman is playing now, here and there. My review is at Film Racket.

The trailer is here: