The One I Love (2014) Que sait-on vraiment de la réalité!? (2004)
A Serious Man. All Critics (208) | Top Critics (46) | Fresh (185) | Rotten (22) | DVD (9) The Coens may play around with that tradition, they may disparage it or mock it.
But they are irrevocably a part of it, and that's all to the good. If you're puzzled by the Coen Brothers' horrific comedies, this is the closest thing you'll get to an explanation. The film's potency is rooted in quiet precision and detailed realisation. Roger Deakins's typically polished photography gives an oppressively hard edge to Midwestern suburbia. Their most inside joke ever, it leaves you with a lot to chew on, if not a lot to enjoy. Mostly, A Serious Man succeeds because it engages questions worth asking.
Life is pain. This might be the Coen Brothers' best film. For all the droll wit on display, it's hard to warm to the Coens' chilly parable. I guess gleeful misanthropy wasn't enough for the Coen Brothers. Brilliant but bleak comedy for mature Coen brothers fans. Michael Clayton. All Critics (197) | Top Critics (43) | Fresh (178) | Rotten (19) | DVD (27) [A] smoldering corporate thriller.
By now, George Clooney is so smooth, he could be a brand name like Gillette or Ex-Lax. Confident in the story's power and the moviegoers' intelligence, Gilroy uses only one explosion to own our rapt attention. A throwback to trim, intelligent moral thrillers like The Verdict and Absence of Malice. This doesn't begin to deserve the Oscar nominations it's likely to get, but I had a good time with it nonetheless.
Smart and exciting, Michael Clayton takes the audience on a ride whose pleasures almost sneak up on you and are all the more satisfying because of it. There's a lot of skill involved in Michael Clayton and an understated, ambiguous hero that's becoming rare in modern film. Michael Clayton is a chilling, intense conspiracy thriller, filled with intriguing characters and great performances. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. All Critics (221) | Top Critics (45) | Fresh (206) | Rotten (15) | DVD (51) Works marvel after marvel in expressing the bewildering beauty and existential horror of being trapped inside one's own addled mind, and in allegorising the self-preserving amnesia of a broken but hopeful heart.
It's the kind of film that could mean more to people after they've left the theater and thought about it awhile. There is little charm in the coupling and almost no erotic intimacy, just a series of nerve-racking conversational collisions. The disappointment I felt at the end of Eternal Sunshine was almost crushing, simply because there were sections of it that were as daring in their emotional directness as anything I've seen in years.
[Kaufman] clearly surpasses himself. Neither wholly cynical nor wholly romantic, Kaufman's story is a balance of smarts and sentiment. Imaginative, loopy romance is for adults only. Michel Gondry tries to channel Fellini and ends up irrigating faulty plumbing. July 2, 2006. O Brother, Where Art Thou? All Critics (152) | Top Critics (37) | Fresh (115) | Rotten (34) | DVD (35) After making what are still probably their two best features, the Coen brothers came up with their worst, a piece of pop nihilism.
Great dialogue, superb 'Scope camerawork from Roger Deakins, and a genuinely wondrous deus ex machina are among the delights. The Coens' usual arch deliberateness isn't quite as deliberate, and there's an appealing shagginess to some of the episodes and performances. It's a wild, whacked-out wonder. February 6, 2001. Pass the Popcorn: Why the World Needs Bond. (Guest post by Greg Forster) After blogging pretty extensively about James Bond back when Quantum of Solace came out, I was disappointed not to get the chance to see Skyfall in the theaters.
When I finally saw it on video, I was devastated not to have seen it in theaters. I needed a lot of words to say everything I had to say about QOS and James Bond in general back in 2008, and those are still some of my favorite posts. I can say what needs to be said about Skyfall in a lot fewer words. And spoiler free to boot, so if you haven’t seen it, I’ve given you no excuse not to. This is the first ever deeply profound James Bond movie. Skyfall is about why the 21st century needs James Bond. The two great errors of our age are, on the one hand, to think that it doesn’t matter what kind of people we are (“dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good” – T.S.
I feel a need to locate this movie alongside The Dark Knight and the Avengers. Casino Royale: Bond for the 21st century.
The Fisher King (1991. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. All Critics (205) | Top Critics (41) | Fresh (171) | Rotten (34) | DVD (3) The movie is riveting in the exact sense of the word: We feel nailed to the screen in the impossible task of working out what is going on-let alone why it matters.
A deliberate, cerebral, grim and utterly absorbing film that makes covert operations appear as unsexy as the Bourne films made them seem fast-paced and thrilling. Ultimately, though, it is very much Oldman's film, thanks to a restrained tour de force performance. Smiley is weathered, worn and beaten down by life, but he's also a quiet, sure force of something that resembles good. "Tinker" radically -- superlatively -- condenses John Le Carré's classic novel, which could scarcely be bounded by seven hourlong episodes in the 1979 BBC adaptation. Moonrise Kingdom (2012.