Movie Review: The Killer (2023)

Genre: Assassination Drama Thriller  

Director: David Fincher  

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Arliss Howard  

Running Time: 118 minutes  

Synopsis: The Killer (Michael Fassbender) is a professional assassin on a mission in Paris. When he fails to execute, he becomes a target, and his hideout in the Dominican Republic is invaded. He sets out to seek revenge on his aggressors, a journey that will take him to New Orleans, Florida, New York, and Chicago.

What Works Well: Director David Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker delve deep into the mind of an elegant but dispassionate killer, where simple rules of preparation and emotional disengagement are the foundations for success and survival. Moments of intense and sometimes brutal action punctuate meticulous attention to detail, and Michael Fassbender glides through the role with a profound sense of human-caused fatalism. The post-punk music of The Smiths is featured on the soundtrack.

What Does Not Work As Well: The focus on one man is exceptionally tight. The context-free narrative carries limited appeal, and one assassin's perspective in first targeting a faceless victim then other mostly nameless enemies is a flimsy foundation for two hours of drama. The narration explores the workings of the inner mind, but becomes repetitive and overbearing.

Conclusion: Stylishly smooth, but the intentional detachment yields apathy.

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Movie Review: Three Thousand Years Of Longing (2022)

Genre: Fantasy Drama Romance

Director: George Miller

Starring: Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba

Running Time: 108 minutes

Synopsis: On a trip to Istanbul, lonely British literary scholar Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) suffers from hallucinations and blackouts. In the backroom of a market store she finds an ancient bottle, and back at her hotel room releases a Djinn (Idris Elba). He grants her three wishes, but she is aware of the pitfalls and careful about what she wants to wish for. To stimulate her imagination the Djinn recounts stories of his past loves from thousands of years past.

What Works Well: Director George Miller enlivens a two-person whimsical drama with a gorgeous visual style, the inventive cinematography playfully celebrating adult fairytales. Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba do their best with the intellectually and spatially confined material.

What Does Not Work As Well: The adaptation of mythical short stories is unsurprisingly choppy, the pacing is slow, and the narrative pathway ultimately tortuous, all to arrive at two trite conclusions: love cannot be forced, and be careful what you wish for. Along the way, the structure surrenders to meandering fragments in desperate search of a unifying soul. 

Conclusion: This Djinn should have stayed in the bottle.



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Movie Review: The Beach (2000)

A story of adventurism seeking docile fulfillment, The Beach succeeds with themes and visuals but fails in creating worthwhile characters.

Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a young American seeking adventure in Thailand. At his hotel he notices the attractive Françoise (Virginie Ledoyen), but she is with boyfriend Étienne (Guillaume Canet). Richard next encounters the unhinged Daffy (Robert Carlyle), who speaks of a secret beach paradise located on an isolated island, and leaves Richard a map to follow. Richard convinces Françoise and Étienne to join him on a quest to find the beach but also reveals the secret map to another group of tourists.

After a long trek and swim, the trio traverse a marijuana plantation protected by armed guards. They then find the idyllic and stunningly beautiful lagoon with a small community of like-minded people from around the world living nearby, led by Sal (Tilda Swinton). Richard luxuriates in a life of idle nothingness and pursues a relationship with Françoise, alienating Étienne, before unexpected events disrupt this version of paradise.

Fully investing in rich visual beauty, The Beach explores the desire to seek what few others have found. What lies at the end of the rainbow and the human propensity to ruin every unspoiled patch of earth is the subject of the John Hodge script, adapting Alex Garland's book. Danny Boyle directs with a here-and-now emphasis, Richard's story dispensing with background and context and just assuming a generational malaise driving a search for exclusivity.

The film works at the personal level as a cautionary tale about the youthful pursuit of an abstract utopia, an escape from social norms where love and beauty are easily acquired for next to no cost. For all his drive to find unique adventure Richard appears content to settle in a place where every day is like every day until the beach starts to reveal its physical and mental dangers, severely disrupting any sense of permanent vacation.

The Beach also functions as a pointed metaphor for foreign intervention and meddling in ancient lands. Sal's community is made up of Americans and Europeans occupying a slice of heaven in Asia, and the foreigners never stop to consider the impact of their actions on the land they are exploiting for selfish fantasies. Needless to say it all threatens to end badly, Richard's personal actions and the group's broader self-indulgence contributing to a fall from this occupied Eden.

But with flat and selfish characters in every corner, ultimately The Beach only dips its toes in any sense of emotional investment. Richard and his fellow adventurers offer nothing beyond the pursuit of an egotistical ideal where leisure is the only objective and success is measured by the achievement of hedonism. As the final act starts to unravel into mythical sidequests, the absence of any sense of empathy and responsibility eats away at the heart of the film, and it's no great loss when the community frays when confronted by hardship.

Leonardo DiCaprio fulfils the objective of cavorting shirtless most of the time, and generally keeps Richard centred on the relentless pursuit of the same uniqueness as everyone else. The rest of the underpowered cast cannot escape the suffocating but beautiful sands of characters checking out of society, only to discover the exceptionally fleeting pleasure of dropping out.

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Movie Review: Hail, Caesar! (2016)

A Hollywood comedy, Hail, Caesar! is an homage to the heyday of the studio system, and just about holds together.

It's 1951 in Hollywood, and Capitol Pictures manager Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has a lot on his hands. The studio is filming a Biblical epic, but star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped by a group of communist writers, who demand a $100,000 ransom. Aquatic musical star DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) is pregnant and not quite sure who the father is.

On the orders of the studio boss, singing cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) is pressed into a starring role in a sophisticated comedy and struggles to follow instructions from director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes). Dancer/singer Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) is filming a navy-themed musical while potentially hiding some secrets. And all the time rival twin sister gossip columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (Tilda Swinton) are circling the studio looking for nasty stories to publish.

Mannix is also trying to stop smoking, and is considering a lucrative offer to quit Hollywood and join the Lockheed corporation. He has to try and keep the kidnapping story away from the press as he arranges for the star's release, and find solutions to DeeAnna's potentially scandalous pregnancy and Hobie's incompetence.

With something different going on within every soundstage, Hail, Caesar! captures the insanity of a workplace where reality is make-believe. Produced, directed and written with a jovial spirit by Joel and Ethan Coen, the film is an affectionate salute to the Golden Age of Hollywood, a place where men controlled the plots points for both the movies and the stars.

The Coen's craft their love letter without resorting to sentimentality. The intention is to deliver fun laced with satire, and along the way the full range of genres popular in the era is skewered to good effect. De Mille-level historical epics, Esther Williams-style lavish swimming pool spectacles, B-level westerns, sparkling romantic comedies and raucous musicals are all weaved into the life Eddie Manx.

He somehow maintains his composure as a crisis erupts with every phone call. His workday consists of putting out fires or delaying their spread while his mind operates at 100 miles per hour to stay ahead of the next scandal, all while battling his cigarette addiction, lying to his wife and confessing (frequently) to his priest.

Within the madness the Coens find time to delve into the mythical communist infiltration of Hollywood, here represented by leftist writers incongruously hanging out at a lavish seaside villa raising funds for their cause by kidnapping Hollywood's biggest star. It does not take long for Baird Whitlock to fall for the eloquently explained communist drivel, in what could be a nod to the typical mental nimbleness of the on-screen talent.

Hail, Caesar! never takes itself seriously, a most appropriate stance for an industry trading in formulating fleeting fantasies.

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Movie Review: Trainwreck (2015)

A raunchy romantic comedy, Trainwreck asks whether wild girls also deserve an opportunity to find true love.

As young girls, sisters Amy and Kim Townsend witnessed their parents divorce and were lectured by their father Gordon (Colin Quinn) that monogamy is an unrealistic expectation. 23 years later, Amy (Amy Schumer) is a magazine writer in New York City, living the wild single life, drinking heavily, smoking weed, and sleeping with a succession of men behind the back of her superficial boyfriend Steven (John Cena). Meanwhile, Kim (Brie Larson) has settled down and is starting a family.

Amy receives an assignment from her editor Dianna (Tilda Swinton) to interview sports Dr. Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), who has devised better surgery procedures to mend the knees of world famous athletes. Despite being polar opposites, Amy and Aaron start to fall in love, threatening Amy's carefree attitude towards life. At the same time Gordon moves into a long term care facility, and his ailing health also forces Amy to reassess his influence and her priorities.

Written by Schumer and directed by Judd Apatow, Trainwreck is a modestly successful attempt to spice up the rom-com genre with a wayward woman at its centre. Having taken her father's advice to heart, Amy is the antithesis of women usually plonked into the middle of a romance. Amy is a foul-mouthed party girl, living life on her own terms, hurting others with her me-first behaviour and straight talk, and looking down upon anyone settling for settling down, starting with her sister.

With Schumer in top comedic form, the jokes arrive at a fast and furious pace, and about half of them hit the target. Amy is at her best offering wry commentary at her own expense or saying it like it is in front of an aghast audience. Much less successful are some cameos by the likes of Chris Evert, Marv Albert and Matthew Broderick, offering nothing but bloat. Basketball stars LeBron James and Amar'e Stoudemire also appear as themselves but fare better and actually contribute some laughs.

Trainwreck gets caught in possession with a central character who is likeable because she's crude and who literally refuses to actually sleep with anyone after sex. It's an emotional dead end if the objective is a happy ending, and for all the raw honesty infused into the character of Amy, fundamentally the film collapses specifically because the romance between Amy and Aaron is based on nothing other than script requirements.

A top-notch celebrated surgeon to the stars and a foul-mouthed trainwreck falling for each other simply does not convince, and neither of them demonstrates any capacity for genuine change to accommodate the other. Either Amy stays true to herself and alone, or softens her edges to be loved. Back on the rails, perhaps, but betraying herself and much less fun.

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Movie Review: Snowpiercer (2013)

A dystopian science fiction thriller, Snowpiercer shimmers with the story of human conflict and survival in a frozen future.

In the near future, the release of an experimental chemical into the atmosphere to lower soaring temperatures due to climate change goes wrong. A new global ice age is immediately triggered and all life is exterminated. The only survivors are on-board Snowpiercer, a massive ark-like train designed for human survival by genius scientist Wilford (Ed Harris), who predicted the catastrophe. The train is powered by a perpetual motion engine and continuously circumnavigates Earth.

Seventeen years pass. The tail section of the train contains "undesirable" passengers who clambered onto the train uninvited, and are now living in deplorable and overcrowded conditions. They include Curtis (Chris Evans), his friend Edgar (Jamie Bell), their spiritual leader Gilliam (John Hurt) and Tanya (Octavia Spencer), the mother of a young child. They are kept alive with daily doses of disgusting protein bars distributed by armed guards who separate them from the elites at the front. The train's snotty leaders are represented by the insufferable Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton).

When the elites initiate the latest round of forcible child abductions from amongst the undesirables, Curtis, Edgar and Gilliam spark a violent uprising with the intention of storming the front cars and taking control of the train. To pry open the security gates the rebels will need to work with expert gate control designer Namgoong (Song Kang-ho) and his 17 year old daughter Yona (Go Ah-sung), who are both drug addicts.

The first English language film directed by South Korea's Bong Joon-ho (who also co-wrote the script), Snowpiercer is a stunning cinematic achievement. Mixing human drama with expertly crafted thriller elements and superlative action scenes, the film offers unrelenting entertainment based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige. The set-up is efficient and compelling. Curtis and his cohorts are introduced and framed as oppressed third class citizens of the train, fed-up with mistreatment and confinement. They each have a background and a story to tell, but collectively they are at the end of their rope and ready to risk everything to overthrow the current order.

Once the storm-the-train plot is set in motion, the action is incessant and drives forward in tandem with the rebels as they progress towards the front. Pitched battles are fought in confined quarters, tactical surprises are sprung and acts of heroism abound. The gore is kept to a manageable level, but there is no mistaking the intensity of this fight for control and dignity.

As the fate of the rebellion ebbs and flows in each successive cabin, the internal and external set designs offer a feast for the eyes and the mind. The ragtag rebels are suddenly exposed to the middle class cabins, including the water manufacturing plant, restaurant services (complete with sushi bar), children's school classes, an aquarium for harvesting seafood, and copious quantities of beef. They also unhappily stumble upon the source of their protein bars.

Meanwhile, as the unstoppable train streaks through the landscape, the glimpses of outside scenery are breathtaking. The Earth is reduced to one destroyed and uninhabitable ice field, the beauty of absolute frozen whiteness juxtaposed with the horrific absence of life.

Snowpiercer is an allegory for social structures and interdependencies, visiting the terrain of Animal Farm and 1984. Who gets to lead, who gets to be exploited, the symbolism of the all-powerful godlike leader and how the head and the tail interact - or not - for the greater good are familiar themes, but rarely has a film dealt better with eternal existential questions about the collective human condition.

Chris Evans find one his best career roles as reluctant rebel Curtis Everett. Evans gets to combine brains with brawn as Curtis steps up to the role of frontline leader, and he emerges as a bonafide circumspect protagonist. Tilda Swinton as the conniving Minister Mason is the other standout performer.

Curtis' disruptive actions open Snowpiercer's doors literally and figuratively, and as always, it's up to every individual member of a social order to choose which of the available doors to walk through, with consequences ranging from inspirational to disastrous.

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Movie Review: The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008)

A grand fantasy romance, The Curious Of Benjamin Button has a quirky premise but delivers an eloquent love story featuring a man living life in reverse.

It's 2005 in New Orleans, and Hurricane Katrina is quickly bearing down on the city. The elderly Daisy Fuller (Cate Blanchett) is on her hospital deathbed, and insists that her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) read to her from the diary of a certain Benjamin Button. Most of the story is then told in flashback.

In 1918, Benjamin is born with the wrinkles, cataracts, arthritis and failing body of an old man. His mother dies during childbirth and his father Thomas (Jason Flemyng) abandons Benjamin to the care of Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who works at a home for the elderly. As Benjamin grows older in age, his body gets younger in health. His hair starts to grow back, his eyesight improves, and a visit to a faith healer gets him out of his wheelchair and on the way to walking. In 1930 Benjamin first meets seven-year-old Daisy (Elle Fanning) and they become friends.  Around 1935 he leaves the nursing home and accepts his first job, working on the tugboat of the salty Captain Mike Clark (Jared Harris). Daisy pursues her fortune as a ballet dancer in New York City.

In 1941 Clark's boat is stationed in the port city of Murmansk, Russia, where Benjamin experiences his first true love and has a passionate affair with Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), the bored wife of a British diplomat. The US joins World War Two and Benjamin has a harrowing encounter with the enemy on the high seas. After the war Benjamin tries to reconnect with Daisy (Blanchett), but their lives are on different trajectories. Meanwhile, his father Thomas reappears with surprising news about an industrial legacy awaiting Benjamin.

Directed by David Fincher and written by Eric Roth, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is a loose adaptation of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. Roth sprinkles the script with plenty of similarities to his own average man lives an extraordinary life as portrayed in Forrest Gump, and monumental but impossible romance through a diary lens popularized by The English Patient. Benjamin Button both suffers from comparisons to the two classics and benefits from the whimsical stars of destiny are aligning ethos. Meanwhile, Fincher makes sure that no matter what is happening on the screen over close to three hours, the film looks spectacular: Benjamin Button is frequently a sumptuous visual feast.

The film's weakness resides in the relative dormancy of its central character. Intriguing as his story is, Benjamin Button does not actually do much in his own life. He is swept along by the tide of history, navigating from 1918 to about 1990 in reverse health progression, things happening to him and all around him, but he himself instigating little. Daisy and Elizabeth steer the two big romances in his life, while his mother Queenie, the captain Mike Clark and Benjamin's father Thomas influence most of his life's directions. It is only late on that Benjamin independently insists on one key decision, but it's a relatively small contribution to a drama where he is most often a passenger and observer.

The film's first half nestles the more magical spirit and is more powerful, Benjamin's childhood years in the more innocent pre-war era resonating through a New Orleans open to strange events. That no one pursues answers to Benjamin's curious medical condition both raises the eyebrow and helps add fairy tale gold dust to the story. The second half is still interesting but less compelling. Benjamin and Daisy have to wait for a sweet spot of harmony as he grows younger and she matures, and there are typical emotional trials and tribulations as they find and then struggle to retain their couplehood.

The subtle and progressive makeup effects are a marvel, with Brad Pitt thriving as he convincingly portrays a physically frail teenager growing into an immature 70 year old in a young man's body. Cate Blanchett is less effective, particularly as the bed-ridden near-death Daisy, her mumbled and drugged lines of dialogue extremely difficult to discern.

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button reaches most of the sentimental high notes that it strives for, and contains enough of its own peculiarities to overcome the more derivative fundamentals.

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Movie Review: Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

An artistic coming-of-age story, Moonrise Kingdom takes a quirky look at young love between two troubled adolescents. The film is a visual delight, and the story includes layers of sharp social commentary.

It's 1965, on a fictional island in New England. Scout Master Randy Ward (Edward Norton) leads a troop of 12 year olds at a summer camp. One morning, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), an orphan and the least popular member of the scout team, goes missing, leaving a polite note behind. Police Captain Duffy Sharp (Bruce Willis) starts a search, and soon discovers that Suzy Bishop, the troubled daughter of Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura (Frances McDormand), is also missing. A year earlier Sam and Suzy met and bonded during a school play performance, and eventually they planned an escape adventure.

Once they learn of the escape, Sam's foster parents immediately disavow him and announce that he is not welcome back at their house. Meanwhile, out in the wilderness Sam uses his scouting skills as he and Suzy hike to a secluded cove, where they set up camp and tentatively start to get intimate. The search intensifies with Ward, his scouts, Sharp and the Bishops frantically trying to find the children, with matters complicated by a relationship between Laura Bishop and the police captain. A representative of Social Services (Tilda Swinton) flies in to help. Sam and Suzy enjoy a few moments of idyllic isolation, but there are surprises and complications ahead, including a mammoth storm.

Directed and co-written by Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom is a fresh take on young and emerging love. With exquisite use of staging, colour and symmetry, Anderson creates a fictional yet potentially real world where the setting is as important as the characters, and the almost magical surroundings contribute to the sense that all is indeed possible. The film thrives on a sense of whimsy as seen through a storytelling lens, and builds to a frantic, blustery finale.

The central characters of Sam and Suzy share the experience of troubled households and loneliness bordering on depression. While keeping the film light, Anderson does not shy away from hinting at the violent tendencies that troubled children are capable of: both Sam and Suzy can and do take care of themselves when needed.

But more sharply, Moonrise Kingdom is about adults contributing to the trauma of children needing something different. Suzy's parents come off worst, seemingly wholly incapable of connecting with their daughter. Meanwhile Sam is suffering through the bullying and ostracizing that comes with being an orphan, and exhibits both the anger and resourcefulness needed to survive in a hostile world. Suzy is so miserable she confides in Sam that she wishes she was an orphan. Pointedly, he responds that he loves her but she doesn't know what she is talking about.

Placing sensual affection at the emotional centre of an idyllically framed, fairytale-like story is mildly startling and adds to the film's uniqueness. The scenes of budding intimacy between the two 12 years old are handled with sensitivity but also honesty, Anderson confronting the reality that two troubled kids are likely to start a journey of sexual exploration sooner than most.

The performances from Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward are touching, and they confront the material with admirable sincerity. They also benefit from a script that allows their characters to be children while yearning to break free of their childhood traumas. For her great escape adventure, Suzy takes along her cat, mounds of cat food, a battery-operated record player, vinyl records and three heavy hardcover books: not exactly items to facilitate a fleet-footed getaway, but fully consistent with what a child would think of.

The adults stick to their assigned supporting roles, with each of Willis, Murray, McDormand and Norton getting limited screen time but also key moments to advance the plot and sketch in Suzy and Sam's background stories.

Poignant and charming, Moonrise Kingdom beams an elegant light over the universal yet intensely personal adventure of childhood graduation.

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Movie Review: Michael Clayton (2007)

A conspiracy drama, Michael Clayton is a cerebral thriller focusing on the underbelly of big corporate machinations in the era of globalization.

Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a fixer on contract with a large New York corporate law firm run by Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack). Michael's job is to make bad news stories go away for the firm's clients. Michael is also recovering from a severe gambling problem and is trying to get away from the rat race, but his attempts to start a restaurant business backfire. Nearly bankrupt, he is under pressure to come up with a lot of money, and fast. With Bach and his team leading a settlement conference representing the interests of large agricultural firm uNorth, Michael narrowly escapes an assassination attempt while on an upstate business trip. He is forced to take stock of what exactly is going on at the law firm.

Four days earlier, Michael was called to Milwaukee to deal with a crisis precipitated by senior lawyer Arthur Edens (Tom Wilknson) suffering a mental breakdown during a deposition. Arthur was the lead lawyer on the uNorth case, defending the firm against a class-action suit involving allegations of poisoned soil on small farms. uNorth's ruthless internal general counsel Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) is not impressed with Arthur's disintegration, and even less impressed with Michael's pragmatic reaction to the crisis. Michael starts to investigate what may have pushed his friend Arthur over the edge of sanity, while Karen sets in motion an alternative plan to save her firm's reputation.

Directed and written by Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton is slick, cool and intellectual. Despite no shortage of criminal activity up to and including severe physical harm, the story is intended to stay just on the right side of grounded, with enough careful credibility to keep the narrative within plausible limits while also serving up excellent entertainment.

Michel Clayton demands concentration and rewards it handsomely. This is a film where scenes are sometimes joined mid-stream, while others appear to truncate early. Nothing is over-explained; the threads are laid out slowly, carefully, but not necessarily in an easy-to-weave pattern. All the events take place over just a few hectic days, but the subtle shift in perspective that occurs in starting near the climax and then drawing back to a few days prior achieves the desired unhinging effect.

Gilroy reveals his secrets on his own terms and according to his chosen pace, and the pay-off is immense. Once the conspiracy starts to take shape it all makes sinister sense, and the events are all driven out of a sense of knee-jerk desperation by corporate leaders wielding enormous power and pushing the envelope due to incredible strain. None of the characters have all the answers, plenty of loose ends remain beyond the reach of any tidying up, and the mess of corporate chicanery represents a familiar spiraling public relations disaster leaving many scattered victims in its wake.

The story boils down to a battle of wills between Michael and Karen, and they only meet twice, at the beginning and end of Michael's ordeal. They are two deeply flawed individuals, wracked by insecurity. In Michael's case his failures are now almost fully public, his humiliation complete once he has to grovel for a loan from Marty. Karen's anxieties are more concealed, but Gilroy bores into her fragile psyche with astonishing scenes of Karen practicing her public persona in private, the general counsel able to hide her jitters from everyone except the woman in the mirror.

George Clooney keeps his charisma wattage in check and delivers an understated performance, one of his most powerful and compelling screen achievements. Swinton gets fewer scenes but is equally magnificent, creating for Karen an icy exterior to conceal demons waiting to burst forth in all the wrong directions. Tom Wikinson and Sydney Pollack lend weighty veteran support, and Michael O'Keefe makes an appearance as another unapologetic shark in the corporate boardroom.

Michael Clayton is a rare example of a supremely smart thriller, where the battle lines are vague and the puppet masters may be hidden in business suits, but are no less lethal for it.

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Movie Review: A Bigger Splash (2015)

A psychological drama about four people entangled in convoluted relationships, A Bigger Splash appears to have important things to say but fails to deliver when it matters.

Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is an established music star recovering from vocal chord surgery. Only able to talk in a whisper, Marianne has retreated to the rustic Italian island of Pantelleria with her partner Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) a documentary filmmaker and recovering alcoholic who attempted suicide a while back.

Their idyllic time away is interrupted when Marianne's former lover Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and his grown daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson) invite themselves to share the same house. Harry is a gregarious, larger than life music producer who was Marianne's partner for many years, and he actually introduced her to Paul. Now he may want to reclaim her love while preying on Paul's vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, Penelope oozes sexuality and proceeds to quietly stir the pot as well.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino, loosely inspired by 1969's La Piscine and financed by Italian film credit money, A Bigger Splash cannot quite shake the vague sense of a few stars gathering for a Mediterranean vacation and filming for convenience. Comprehensively too long at over two hours, the David Kajganich screenplay struggles to find content once the characters are set. There is a solid hour of time to kill between the initial introductions and the final act, and that middle segments drags with barely a pulse.

Guadagnino kills the time with plenty of pretty scenery, a lot of tasteful nudity and a few meaningful conversations, and finds a highlight with Ralph Fiennes doing a solo dance to Emotional Rescue by The Rolling Stones. But there is precious little narrative development to speak of, and the themes of love won and lost, jealousy, betrayal, depression, substance abuse, illicit liaisons and career loss are hinted at and then set loose in the Italian breeze, never to find context or shelter. The bolted-on sub-plot of Pantelleria serving as a landing spot for illegal migrants serves as a further reminder of how little progress is being made among the main characters

And when the emotions erupt into the open, the film takes a sudden leap from subdued to wild. Instead of arguments there is violence, and the film disintegrates into a half-baked investigation followed by a sloppy wrap-up. The four central performances are all excellent and maintain a basic level of interest, but the good acting alone does not paper over the structural weaknesses.

For all its tedious pretensions, A Bigger Splash is actually a smaller plonk.

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The Movies Of Tilda Swinton

All movies starring Tilda Swinton and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Beach (2000)

Vanilla Sky (2001)

Adaptation (2002)

Broken Flowers (2005)

Michael Clayton (2007)

Burn After Reading (2008)

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008)

We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Snowpiercer (2013)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Trainwreck (2015)

A Bigger Splash (2015)

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Uncut Gems (2019, voice only)

Three Thousand Years Of Yearning (2022)

The Killer (2023)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

A tense and disturbing family drama, We Need To Talk About Kevin delves into the back story of a teenager gone bad. Tilda Swinton is captivating as the mother left to wallow in the shattered debris of what used to be her domestic life.

Constructed non-linearly by director Lynne Ramsey, We Need To Talk About Kevin follows two basic time lines. The first occurs in the present, with Eva Khatchadourian (Swinton) living alone and depressed in a small ramshackle house by the rail tracks and trying to get on with life. Her house is targeted with paint bombs, and her neighbours greet her with angry stares, angry words and sometimes outright violence. Eva secures a job beneath her abilities at a dingy strip-mall travel agency, where her co-workers shun her. She visits her son Kevin (Ezra Miller) in prison, but the visits are silent.

The second timeline occurs in flashback, with Eva reminiscing about her family life. Husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) is never less than loving, but from the moment their child Kevin is born, the bond between mother and son is dysfunctional. As an infant Kevin never stops crying while in the company of Eva. As a toddler he is late to start talking and even later in getting toilet trained. But the worst of his anger and anti-social misbehaviour always appears to be targeted at his mother. As a teenager, Kevin is particularly sullen with Eva, while his father encourages him to excel at archery, the one sport that seems to make him happy. Finally Kevin's behaviour starts to turn menacingly violent, with his young sister Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich) the first to be vulnerable to his increasingly harmful actions.

Presenting a scenario in answer to the beseeching question of what goes on in the family lives of middle-class kids who prove to be really damaged, We Need To Talk About Kevin is unrelenting in portraying a mother's quiet nightmare. Kevin is the teenager who may well be perceived as well-adjusted and typical by everyone else, but in Eva's recollection, something was wrong from the beginning, with persistent signs of some undiagnosed damage, ill-will towards her, and anger boiling beneath the surface. Kevin is just a normal kid as far as his father and everyone else is concerned, but Eva's experience dances on the seam between blaming herself for lacking a mother's instinct and being convinced that her child is evil.

The one weakness in the script by Ramsey and Roy Stewart Kinnear, based on the Lionel Shriver book of  the same name, is the almost incessant portrayal of Kevin as a bad seed in all of Eva's memories. There is no attempt to balance whatever good moments there may have been between mother and child: it's a uniformly grim experience. The one joyful moment recollected by Eva involves Kevin suddenly feeling close to her when she reads a Robin Hood adventure to him. It emerges that Kevin was actually switched on by the subject matter of archery, rather than any affection towards his mother.

Tilda Swinton dominates the movie, and her portrayal of Eva is a stunning portrait of a woman victimized first by her son and then by society, and yet she can never shake the lingering doubts that the tragedy unleashed by Kevin is somehow her fault. In each of her memories interacting with Kevin, Swinton is perfect in planting those tiny yet precise seeds of imperfection in how a mother handled her son, from the way she held him, to the games she played with him, and her methods of discipline. Swinton silently conveys the eternal question that will dominate the rest of Eva's life: if she had only done everything just a little bit differently, would the outcome still have been the same.

Ezra Miller as the teenaged Kevin is chillingly calculating and manipulative, an adolescent already occupying a different world compared to his mother, emotionally dominant, physically brooding, and plotting seemingly several steps ahead to make her life a misery.

In demanding a conversation about the most disastrous of family unit failures We Need To Talk About Kevin does not arrive at any tidy answers, but simply a myriad of doubts, suspicions and what ifs, affirmation that when the problem is complex, any simple explanations are simply wrong.

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