Review: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

* * 1/2
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman

"It's a metaphor." Flesh for flesh. He's not saying it's right, necessarily, but it's the only way he can see to balance the books and make them both whole. Yorgos Lanthimos' latest film is built around a long standoff between a teenage boy driven by righteous certainty and a middle-aged man who thinks he can put off the inevitable, with three other lives caught in the middle. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is neither as bonkers as 2009's Dogtooth nor as darkly delightful as last year's The Lobster. In truth it's a little bit of a slog, relentless in its brutality and building little narrative momentum as it puts its characters through the paces of psychological torture. I wouldn't say that I hated it, and I certainly wouldn't say that it isn't a skilled piece of work, but by the time it was finished I was definitely ready for it to be over. If you're going to see it I recommend seeing it cold and knowing as little about the plot as possible, so consider this a spoiler warning.

Review: The Beguiled (2017)

* * *
Director: Sofia Coppola
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning

The effect that he has is immediate. It's a change - a charge - in the air, a fear that pulsates through the house, something that at once repels and attracts. He's a volatile presence, a grenade tossed into a room, and yet everyone seems surprised when the situation finally explodes. A hothouse melodrama adapted from the novel of the same name, The Beguiled makes excellent use of Colin Farrell's capacity for soulful villainy and Nicole Kidman's for icy ferocity, but ultimately ends up being slightly less than it perhaps could have been. It's a handsomely mounted film (Philippe Le Sourd's cinematography, in particular, stands out for its atmospheric contribution) and well-acted all around, but it tends to strike symbolic poses more often than it actually uses its narrative to really say anything, resulting in a good movie that never quite reaches greatness.

Review: Lion (2016)

* * *
Director: Garth Davis
Starring: Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman

Lion is the kind of movie that you leave feeling compelled to do some investigating because even if you can accept that its incredible premise is true, you have a hard time believing that it could actually have happened the way that the movie tells it. Yet it did. Real life is stranger than fiction can ever hope to be, and more heart-warming, too. That natural sense of awe that flows from the fact that the story is true ends up doing a fair bit of the heavy lifting in Lion, which is overall a fine film with great performances, but which is strangely uneven in its storytelling, getting off to a rollicking start, slowing way, way down in its second half, and then unfolding its finale at lightning speed. But man, what a finale that is.

Netflix Recommends... The Paperboy (2012)

* * *
Director: Lee Daniels
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Zac Effron, Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, David Oyelowo

The Paperboy was one of the most critically reviled films of 2012, a film lambasted for everything except Nicole Kidman's performance, which received Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe nominations and at the time seemed to be a real threat for an Oscar nomination. When it showed up in my recommendations from Netflix, I was more intrigued than anything, and after watching it I was greatly surprised because it's actually not terrible. It's lurid and trashy, but it's lurid and trashy by design not by accident, and there's something weirdly admirable about Lee Daniel's willingness to get right down there in the swamp with his characters, making the film as down and dirty as the people within it. Parts of it are pretty gross, parts of it feel undisciplined and self-indulgent, but if there's one thing The Paperboy isn't, it's boring.

Review: Stoker (2013)

* * * 1/2
Director: Park Chan-wook
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, Nicole Kidman

There’s something very wrong in the Stoker house. When people aren’t disappearing, they’re appearing suddenly, after decades’ absence, and casting a sinister pall over everything. Stoker, South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s English language debut, is a brutally effective and atmospheric thriller of almost immaculate execution. Almost. It flies off the rails a little bit in its third act, but at least it looks great while it’s doing it, and manages to pull things back on track in time for the finale. If nothing else, Stoker is a very welcome reprieve from the weak “first quarter” selections at theaters lately.