Movies
Damien Chazelle’s followup to Whiplash is a Los Angeles-set musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a couple of Hollywood strivers who fall in love. And if you’re going to fall hard for Chazelle’s daring and beautiful film, it will probably be at first sight.
This film is based on one of those stories that’s almost too incredible to be true. As a young boy growing up in a poor village in India during the 1980s, Saroo Brierley was lost nearly 1 700km from home with no way to retrace his steps. Eventually adopted by an Australian couple, he became obsessed decades later with tracking down his birth family using Google Earth. Based on Brierly’s memoir, it’s a complex movie, with its profound themes of home and identity, and its disparate halves.
This film takes its sweet time constructing a solid, suspenseful, well-executed set-up.The screenplay by Steven Knight – in which a World War II Allied officer finds himself falling in love with and eventually marrying a woman later suspected of being a German spy – is one long, ticking time bomb, tightly calibrated, with a charge both erotic and romantic by Robert Zemeckis’s slick, professional direction. Brad Pitt as dashing London-based Canadian Air Commander Max Vatan, and Marion Cotillard as sultry French Resistance agent Marianne Beauséjour – tempers its star power with genuine chemistry.
In his outings as writer-director, Ben Affleck has shown an aptitude for tense, gritty material, arguably even more so in the vividly inhabited working-class Boston crime milieu of Gone Baby Gone and The Town than in his Oscar-winner Argo. So, part of the disappointment of his engrossing but unexceptional fourth feature Live by Night is the departure from Boston early on, when the action shifts to Prohibition-era Florida. But the more nagging hole is Affleck himself, playing a tough guy with a sense of right and wrong, in a stolid performance without the necessary gravitas.
Will Smith plays a grieving father whose business associates plot to break through his pain in David Frankel’s drama. Frankel’s all-star weepy works on its own manipulative terms, spreading its trail of goopy sentiment and inspirational homilies with some decent acting against the