‘The Messenger’ is unerring on its own dramatic terms but misses an opportunity by offering character over punishing war-death notifications
‘Hurt Locker’ overplays its coda but is an intense serial with authenticity and narrative momentum, and the script lets the actors carry it.
I love the elegant subversion of history in ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ how the Basterds themselves are MacGuffins, and QT’s endless patience.
In the opening of 28 Weeks Later, Don (Robert Carlyle) faces a dilemma: He can leave his wife to die and run like hell on the off chance that he might outrun the “infected,” or he can stay with her and face a gruesome end. He runs like hell, and looks back to see his wife attacked. This is the movie writ small, laying the groundwork for more impossible choices.
In A Very Long Engagement, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fervid need to turn everything into fussy, over-processed whimsy is wholly incongruous with its primary subject: war.
For the past three decades, Tim O’Brien has been trying to tell true war stories – even though most of them, strictly speaking, are fiction.
Terrence Malick spent 20 years away from Hollywood, 10 of those bringing The Thin Red Line to theaters. The work that ended up on the screen clearly stewed too long in one man’s brain, and I expect the movie the reclusive director thought he made is actually quite different from the one I saw.