Archive | Reviews

“Ex Machina,” the much-anticipated directorial debut from British screenwriter Alex Garland (“Sunshine,” “28 Days Later”), is brimming with big ideas. About a mogul and his robot, it tackles the construction of gender, sexual desire, and artificial intelligence with a sleek, Scandinavian design that transcends a modest budget but buckles under its own ingenuity–like a dystopian thriller made by those kids at Ikea.

Domhnall Gleeson, contemporary cinema’s favorite ginger-haired everyman, plays Caleb, a 24-year-old coder for Bluebook, a Google-like Internet company, who wins a lottery prize to spend a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the company’s reclusive founder and CEO. It’s no coincidence that Gleeson has also starred in a key episode of “Black Mirror,” the sly, slightly futuristic BBC series about the dangers and delights of technology; in his brief career, the clever Irishman has already established himself as the reigning shorthand for male vulnerability, a topic consuming contemporary science fiction (and, not so subtly, Garland himself). Continue Reading →

Olivier Assayas may be one of the finest directors on either side of the Pond but his work, as subtle as it is strong, has rarely inspired superlatives. This may change with his newest, “Clouds of Sils Maria.” It’s hard to imagine a swoonier, smarter meditation on the intersection of gender, age, power, and the performance arts – especially one that passes the Bechdel Test with such flying colors. Here lies a film so deftly soulful that it revives the most tired of cinematic genres: the metamovie.

Internationally acclaimed movie star Juliette Binoche plays internationally acclaimed movie star Maria Enders, whose most intimate – if one-sided – relationship is with her personal assistant, Val (Kristen Stewart, who’s presumably had an assistant or two in her time). Enders has been asked to appear in a new staging of the (fictional) play “Maloja Snake” as a suicidal, middle-aged businesswoman romantically manipulated by a ruthless twenty-something female assistant. The problem: She still identifies with the younger character, whom she portrayed in a film adaptation of the same story – and which launched her career two decades before. Add in the fact that the actress who originally portrayed the older woman died soon after the play closed, and Maria is genuinely spooked, especially after the playwright, Wilhelm (loosely based on German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder), dies on the night she’s to accept an award on his behalf. Lest all this not be meta enough, Assayas co-wrote Binoche’s first starring role in Andre Techine’s “Rendez-vous” (1985), about an up-and-coming actress, and created “Clouds of Sils Maria” when she challenged him, after appearing in his real-estate drama “Summer Hours” (2008), to write a part that better encapsulated the female experience. Continue Reading →