I had totally forgotten that Dan Gilory’s “Velvet Buzzsaw” was released on Netflix until I scrolled through the streaming giant’s service this past week. I had seen it at its world premiere on January 27th at the Sundance Film Festival.
Read more‘Velvet Buzzsaw’ Trailer: Jake Gyllenhaal Reunites With ‘Nightcrawler’ Director for Arthouse Horror
Consider me intrigued by Dan Gilroy's "Velvet Buzzsaw," by far, my most anticipated film of this year's upcoming Sundance Film Festival. This is quite clearly a return to the societal underground malaise that Gilroy tackled with Jake Gyllenhaal in "Nightcrawler."
Read morePaul Dano's austere "Wildlife" is anchored by a sublime Carey Mulligan performance
What can I say about Paul Dano‘s "Wildlife'? It's a sluggishly austere film that lacks any kind of personality or poignancy but, hey, in this day and age of style over substance, I do understand why this otherwise strongly directed and photgraphed picture is being favorably reviewed by most critics. Dano shows a real knack for distilled, freezingly detached framing. You can tell he's learned a thing or two from working with Paul Thomas Anderson -- the photo snapping sequences in "Wildlife" will remind any knowledgeable cinephile of the mall photo scenes in "The Master."
Read moreNot even Joaquin Phoenix Can Save Languidly-Delivered “The Sisters Brothers”
You can usually count on director Jacques Audiard to deliver the goods and, more times than not, he does. I was rather taken by his last four films, (in order of preference, "A Prophet," "Rust and Bone," “The Beat My Heart Skipped," and "Dheepan") all dealing with the dark corners of male masculinity. That's why his latest, "The Sisters Brothers," a grimy, gunky Western filled with absurdist nihilism, suffers from being so, well, un-Audiard-esque.
Set in 1851, the film deals with brothers and assassins Charlie and Eli Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly play the Cowboys), as it languishes its Northwestern setting, deep through the mountains of Oregon, right into a dangerous brothel in the small town of Mayfield, and ending in the gold rush-set landscape of California. Paralleling their story are Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed's lone drifters, them too set on striking it rich in California.