| Critic |
Review |
Quote |
Analysis |
This Week's Verdict |
David Edelstein,
New York |
Diving Bell and the Butterfly |
"In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Schnabel re-creates Jean-Do's constricted universe from the inside out, and the film becomes an act of sympathetic disjunction. Whatever Schnabel's posturings as a painter, he's a major film director, alive not only to light and texture but to characters' emotions — which twist the light and warp the textures and permeate the canvas." |
I sometimes get this creeping fear that nobody assesses the way a movie appears in relation to its content. David Edelstein, you are one reassuring cat. |
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Tasha Robinson,
The Onion AV Club |
Diving Bell and the Butterfly |
"As with his two earlier films, Before Night Falls and Basquiat, Schnabel seems fixated on artists' detached, beyond-ordinary vision of the world, which he once again communicates through a swooping, dipping POV that approaches things from odd angles, and catches them in hushed tones. Initially, he views the world through Bauby's eyes, overlaying his thoughts atop the dialogue of the blurry people around him, to emphasize how little impact his incommunicable feelings have on them. Surprisingly, though, the film's emotions mostly stay low-key." |
Diving Bell is super-smart but gives you motion sickness and seems detached. How many different ways can you say Julian Schnabel made this movie?
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Manohla Dargis,
New York Times |
The Savages |
"They mess you up, your mum and dad, Philip Larkin more or less wrote, which, though it provides steadfast inspiration for poets of all disciplines, has emerged as one of the banes of American independent cinema. At first glance The Savages, which had its premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival, looks like another one of those dreaded indie encounter sessions in which everyone cracks wise and weary on the bumpy road to self-actualization. Ms. Jenkins, whose gifted first feature, Slums of Beverly Hills, fired up movie screens and critics nearly a decade ago, seems incapable of such falsity. I bet she knows the rest of Larkin's poem, namely, 'They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.'" |
If you've turned on the IFC channel anytime in the past ten years, you have seen a version of this movie. But that version only has a 50% chance of Philip Seymour-Hoffman being in it. |
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Nick Pinkerton,
Village Voice |
Chronicle of an Escape |
"The primary mode of Adri‡n Caetano's filmmaking is immediacy — handheld camera work that shoves in close to snuffle up every wince — but that's the only access point to this hermetic, shuttered world of hurt. There's barely a contrasting glimpse of life beyond captivity; the performances are all mortised with pain; the prisoners — unshaven, dirty, and blending into the soiled walls of their quarters — melt into one murky miasma of destitution. Chronicle might be utterly uncompromising in its 'you are there' visceral style — or just unresourceful. I tend toward the latter reading." |
Unresourceful, eh? Not a word, Pinkerton. It's not a word. |
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