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The audience, on and off-screen, is introduced to a set of empty chairs. Musicians look uncomfortable as they step onstage. The scene cuts before they begin to play. Voila! Instant suspense. Director Yaron Zilberman’s drama “A Late Quartet” grapples with the medium of classical music. Like in “A Clockwork Orange,”
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It’s just pure coincidence that Robert Zemeckis’s last two live-action films have a plane-crash at the core of their stories. In “Cast Away” (2000), FedEx employee Chuck Noland’s life takes a harrowing turn after a plane crash strands him on an unpopulated island. In “Flight” (2012), airline pilot Whip Whitaker
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Minimalism is the defining feature of director Julia Loktev’s third film, “The Loneliest Planet.” Dialogue is sparse at best, plot is almost nonexistent in terms of physical action and occurrences of musical soundtrack are few and far between, repeating the same arrangement of grating strings whenever it plays. Instead, it
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The scorpions and ants of the film being created within Ry Russo-Young’s newest drama, “Nobody Walks,” are magnified, aestheticized and set to synth, accentuating the smallest of their movements and the insignificance of their existence. These clips are the only moments shown in black and white in the otherwise color-saturated
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Mark O’Brien is a 38-year-old polio survivor who spends most of his time in an iron lung. With the help of his two affable caregivers, Vera and Rod, Mark seems to ameliorate the worst excesses of his affliction with good humor and perseverance. In the hyper-liberal Bay Area bubble in
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First catechism: Honor thy consumer.” Sonmi-451, a fast-food server at a glitzy, underground food court, utters the sacred phrase in Neo Seoul in the year 2144. It seems that directors Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski (sibling directors otherwise known as the Wachowski Starship) took this first catechism to
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It’s always exciting to hear when a nonwhite actor is offered a role more substantial than the thankless supporting parts actors of color are usually saddled with. Even more exciting is when filmmakers take a chance on an unknown face to carry an entire film. The sad truth is that
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“Smashed” is one of those movies that would sink right into a pile of the year’s misfires if it weren’t for a powerhouse lead performance anchoring it all the way through. The movie follows Kate, a jovial drinker and first-grade teacher, through her exacerbating alcoholism and her struggle to admit
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In the waiting room of Oakland’s Highland Hospital, there is much at stake. Faces loom and hover, and almost always provoke. Some are creased with lines of sorrow, others sag with fatigue, and a few glow with mirth. This amalgam of emotions reflects what we undergo as we watch the
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Year-round, a grim, cold, bleached-out rain finds the holes in the roof of the English farmhouse called Wuthering Heights. Its echoes are so loud and menacing that it almost silences the furtive characters that walk the moors of this latest adaptation of the famous 1847 novel. These characters trudge the
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