Review: The Lost City of Z (2017)

* * * 1/2
Director: James Gray
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller

To obsess over something for years, to work so hard, to be so close and find that it is just beyond your reach - it would be enough to drive a person mad. The Lost City of Z, based on the non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann and centering on Percy Fawcett's search for a lost civilization in the Amazon jungle, does not treat Fawcett as though it thinks he was mad for continuously returning to the jungle, but makes a fairly compelling case for how he might have been driven mad by everything outside of the jungle. The film features touches that are reminiscent of such films as Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo, and, especially, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, all films that know madness well, and reunites writer/director James Gray with cinematographer Darius Khondji after 2014's The Immigrant. Mesmerizing and often soulful, The Lost City of Z is a beautiful and bewitching story about one man's unconquerable desire to know the unknown.

Review: Life (2015)

* * 1/2
Director: Anton Corbijn
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Dane DeHaan

Before his first film (and the only one he actually lived to see released) even came out, James Dean was already on his way to attaining status as an icon thanks to the still images put out to promote him and which captured the restless, hungry cool which was just as vibrantly apparent on film. Some of those photos were captured by Dennis Stock, who ended up immortalizing what would be Dean's final trip home to Indiana, the pictures appearing in Life magazine just before the premiere of East of Eden. Anton Corbijn's latest film is about that trip and what would be the brief friendship between Stock and Dean. Like many biopics, it ends up feeling as if it just skims the surface of its subject, but in its languid way it nicely captures the potentially volatile relationship between the person on one side of a camera and the person on the other as they negotiate the ways and means of representation.

Canadian Film Review: Maps to the Stars (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Julianne Moore, John Cusack

For me, Maps to the Stars is a bit of return to form for David Cronenberg, whose last two films - the decent, but kind of bloodless A Dangerous Method, and the ambitious but dull Cosmopolis - didn't really do much for me. A bit messy, tonally inconsistent, full of "unlikeable" characters, and centering on subject matter that can most generously be described as "uncomfortable," Maps is certain to have its detractors, but I enjoyed it for its dark comedy, its scathing view of celebrity, and its terrific performances. That said, after this film and Interstellar it will be some time before I need to see another film which finds it necessary to have its characters repeat one section of one poem over and over and over again.

Review: The Rover (2014)

* * *
Director: David Michod
Starring: Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson

The Rover, writer/director David Michod's follow up to his brilliant 2010 debut Animal Kingdom, is a brutal and bleak vision of the future. Set in Australia a decade after a global economic collapse has turned the landscape into a desolate wasteland where life is cheap and violence comes easy, the film isn't science fiction so much as a good old fashioned western about a loner riding the plains in search of the men who wronged him, pushing further and further into the frontier. On a performance level, and often on a technical level, The Rover is a very good movie and I have no doubt that it will find many champions, yet as I finished watching it I was left cold. Individual pieces of the film are brilliant but, taken as a whole, the narrative starts to seem relentlessly prosaic the longer it carries on, which left me feeling split on the result. In the end, I think that The Rover is a decent movie, but one which doesn't really have anything new or different to say.