Cinema Paradiso
in 2007’s ‘Michael Clayton,’ was anything but a standard-issue baddie.”
Director-writer Tony Gilroy imbued her with “ever more complex layers of self-doubt and quivering desperation, rather than the brittle, shark-like amorality we’ve come to expect from similar bigbusiness villains.” He harbors some sympathy for even his most loathsome characters, she observes.
I was thinking of her chapter on sound and music while watching “Dunkirk,” a movie destined for some Oscar love. “The best score watches the movie with the viewers, not for them; it’s baked into the film, rather than being slathered on top like too much sugar icing.” That is a perfect way to describe the Hans Zimmer score for Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece.
She tries to pinpoint why the three “Star Wars” prequels paled in comparison to their predecessors — flabby, over-busy second acts — and acknowledges that acting “might be the most deceptively difficult aspect of filmmaking, because its best practitioners make it look very easy.” She singles out a Brad Pitt scene in “Babel” and one with Robin Wright in “Nine Lives” for examples of wrenching, well-executed emotion.
No such praise comes for Adam Sandler, raunch-com regular Rose Byrne, the “Lord of the Rings” films or 3-D, unless it’s employed in “Hugo,” “Gravity” or “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”
And while the author acknowledges she would rather lay asphalt on a 100-degree day than attend Comic-Con, “in the hands of Joss Whedon, Kenneth Branagh, and the brother team of Anthony and Joe Russo, the recent Marvel Comics ‘Avengers’ movies have become showcases for smart writing, nuanced acting, and timely allegory, even in the midst of cartoonish action.”
Documentaries and fact-based dramas, which could merit a separate book, get short shrift and I disagree with her brief assessment of Rob Marshall’s musicals as “clumsily filmed [and] overedited.”
But Ms. Hornaday expertly shares why some films seem magnificent or mediocre, why details matter (a horse’s heartbeat in “Secretariat,” the electrifying walk through the Copacabana in “GoodFellas,” the workaday routine opening “United 93”) and why directors with “chops” can seize the dayand magical movie moment.