Category: Reviews

Arbitrage

“What’s an Applebees?” Hedge fund CEO Robert Miller is so out of touch with the world and with himself that he can deliver a hilarious line like this and still be snidely condescending. He’s the anti-hero of “Arbitrage,” a character drama about a scummy guy with a lot of money and nothing to do with it.

Robert’s (Richard Gere) company Miller Capital is currently involved in a multi-million dollar fraud scheme as he tries to arrange a merger and avoid bankruptcy. It’s clear he has to get this merger, but the dialogue is strictly jargon, and at the end of the day, his need to get money and meet the bottom line seems self-serving.

But he’s also a fraud at home. Upon coming in late to his own birthday party, he grabs a stuffed animal and a package from a servant to hand to his grandkids as he walks in the door. When his family brings out the cake, he acts humble and surprised but has a speech in his back pocket.

And that’s not the worst of it. Robert is cheating on his wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon) with a young artist named Julie (Laetitia Casta). After missing her art show and upsetting her, he proposes the two of them drive off and vacation for a few days. But behind the wheel, Robert falls asleep and gets into a wreck that kills Julie. Fearing that he’ll be revealed for having an affair, he leaves the scene and peculiarly uses a payphone to call Jimmy (Nate Parker), a young black man from Harlem, to pick him up. The detective assigned to the accident (Tim Roth) then tries to pin obstruction of justice to Jimmy as a way of getting to Robert, and his resolve as a person is tested in his effort to stay clean.

The assumption would be that by the end of this mess, Robert will either be punished, learn the error of his ways or we as an audience will come away with more fodder for the class warfare argument. But writer/director Nicholas Jarecki has made a character drama first and a thriller second. “Arbitrage” is not a message movie. It observes how a man who for so long has been operating on earning more and more and staying that way can ultimately think no differently.

Gere is on fire in one scene where he talks about a copper mine that is such a sure thing that it is practically printing money. He comes across as so effortlessly indoctrinated by the idea that he can’t even begin to question the consequences. Gere is so cool and charming that he makes it hard for us to accept how heartless his character is. We want him to succeed, and we’re wrapped up in what will happen.

“Arbitrage” loses some points for not fully developing Robert’s wife as a tragic figure in this household, and it potentially has so much to say about these one percenters but holds its tongue beyond a few comments by Roth’s detective.

And yet there’s a beautiful shot where Robert steps into an elevator and lights flicker red like a devilish halo just above his head. “Arbitrage” distances itself from this besmirched man, but it’s riveting as if we’re drawn in at the sight of the Almighty Dollar.

3 stars

Flight

“Flight” is a stirring, suspenseful and even hurtful portrait of alcoholism, but it is studio filmmaking that takes us for a ride, proving that some people need to embrace the edge to even stay upright.

“Flight” proves this so strongly in an early action scene that would befit “United 93.” Captain Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is a pilot who has just taken off into rocky, severe turbulence. He pushes the plane past its speed limits to break out of the storm into clear skies, but all the danger is necessary to stay safe. The twist is, he’s drunk as a skunk. He stayed awake the entire night in bed with one of his beautiful flight attendants and capped off the morning with some hits of cocaine, his way of instantly beating a hangover where an aspirin won’t do.

But nearing descent, the plane suffers a critical mechanical failure, and Whip executes a daring maneuver, turning the plane upside down to counter the rapid decline and carry into a glide. In the inevitable crash, only six of the 102 people onboard are killed, and Whip is hailed as a hero.

Whip’s dilemma is that if he were to embrace his heroic side by basking in the press, it would soon be revealed that he’s an addict and that he may have been responsible for the accident. It doesn’t matter that the plane was found to be faulty, and the news that no other pilot put through the same simulated conditions somehow hits a hollow note. What’s important is that we trust him and that he can trust himself.

Denzel Washington’s nuanced performance convinces us that Whip is a man in control and fully aware of his vices. He boldly asserts to his girlfriend Nicole (Kelly Reilly), another addict, that he chooses to drink and that he doesn’t need AA because he is the pilot charting his own course. We sympathize with Whip because few actors other than Washington could appear so effortlessly confident, and yet his actions remain questionable, his emotions remain guarded and his personality remains a mystery.

The movie is directed by Robert Zemeckis, making “Flight” the first live-action feature he’s directed since 2000’s “Cast Away.” Like that film, it’s about a man getting to know himself, isolated from the people he cares about, but it tells it all through moments of state of the art special effects and action. The flight scene in particular is done with a firm hand and clear eye, not the jumbled images of a man impaired. It provides the metaphor of being fully aware of our downward spiral and an inability to stop it.

In the same way Whip softens the blow of the crash, “Flight” succeeds brilliantly in telling this layered story with moments of levity and excitement. John Goodman is hilarious as an oafish drug dealer just as controlling of his reckless behavior as Whip. Rarely has a scene in which the hero of a drama hits rock bottom been this funny, but Goodman helps it hit just the right note.

Robert Zemeckis’s recent animated films have been a mixed bag to put it politely, but “Flight” is a wonderful return to form with a great story and performance at its core.

4 stars

Skyfall

After a 50 year run, “Skyfall” is the best James Bond movie in years, if not the best ever made. It is the first that has made us ask about Bond’s past and future and the first to make us realize the game has changed but that we’d be nowhere without him.

Sam Mendes picks up the franchise after the unfortunate hiccup that was “Quantum of Solace,” a movie that made Bond into a forgettable Jason Bourne. What he brings to the table is style mixed with the silly and substance mixed with the smarm. It’s a Bond movie as ludicrous and fun as the previous but going beyond the grittily realistic norm established by “Casino Royale.”

Its magnificent opening motorcycle chase along rooftops has Bond (Daniel Craig) pursuing a man who has stolen a hard drive containing the identities of all the MI6 operatives. The two leap onto a moving train upon which Bond tears off the back end of a trolley with a bulldozer and leaps aboard, adjusting his suit ever so justly as he does. As they fight, M (Judi Dench) orders her other agent Eve (Naomi Harris) to take a risky sniper shot that hits Bond instead of the target.

Presumed dead, Bond spends the next few years off the map “enjoying death,” going through the motions of a freewheeling lifestyle with cold detachment. It’s only when a cyber terrorist attack against MI6 hits that Bond decides to return. His new target is Silva (Javier Bardem), a former computer hacker for MI6 with a vendetta against M. His presence tests whether Bond or M are both fit for duty, allowing us to finally reach these characters on an emotional level without sacrificing Craig’s biting wit or Dench’s spitfire attitude.

If there’s one thing to notice about “Skyfall,” it’s that Bond has never looked better. Director of Photography Roger Deakins, a man with nine Oscar nominations and still no victory, is possibly the best cinematographer alive today. He’s made a recent shift from film to digital, and he has taken the dark shadows and sharp colors usually found in a David Fincher movie and applied it to the classical look of 007. In one early fight scene in Shanghai, he blends space, depth and color to create a beautiful battle of silhouettes that looks as good as anything I’ve seen this year. And later when the film takes us to a deserted villa on the Scottish countryside, the unreal lighting and deep focus of Javier Bardem illuminated in front of a burning building holds up as instantly iconic. It’s a drop-dead gorgeous movie that just makes the whole experience ignite.

This blending of aesthetics matches the high psychological stakes Mendes is imposing. If “Skyfall” had forgotten to be an action movie first, the super serious talk about whether the world still needs Bond might get as tiresome as a discussion about sending Grandma to a nursing home. But screenwriter John Logan establishes a high-tech cyber scheme that still finds ways for Bond to be practically and physically intuitive. The computer hacker one step ahead of the good guys is ground well tread by other recent action movies, but never Bond. Somehow he fits in as smoothly as though he were still at the poker table.

Much has already been said about Judi Dench finally giving a hefty performance as M that befits her talents, but I’m more interested in the juicy work by Bardem. Most Bond villains have a physical disability designed to distinguish them, but Bardem makes do on his snakelike sexuality that in a delicious scene briefly tests Bond’s own. His presumed homosexuality is in its own way another mixed bag of political incorrectness, but in screen villainy terms it’s the absolute tops.

Mendes takes great pains to treat such a terrific villain with stealthy patience. The moment in which Silva is introduced is a wonderful long take that watches Bardem slowly saunter up to Bond as he tells a story about how catch rats. In wide shots, striking composition and a steady hand, Mendes provides style and flair uncommon to the gritty realism of contemporary action pictures.

“Skyfall” really is Bond reinvented. It takes the uncouth, rugged James Bond newly discovered in “Casino Royale” and molds him into a man with depth and class. “Youth does not guarantee innovation,” as Bond says in one scene to Q, and as one of the finest movies of the year, it’s clear this 50 year old franchise feels as good as new.

4 stars

Take Shelter

The usual through line for family movies about mental or physical disabilities involves the struggle of the family to care and love for a disabled person. “Take Shelter” however considers that were a father to suffer a mental illness, he may lose his masculinity and his ability to care for his family. For all this to come in a riveting, often surreally brilliant psychological thriller shows the intense bravura filmmaking at play in Jeff Nichols’s film.

Like Nichols’s first film “Shotgun Stories,” “Take Shelter” finds depth and character in its vivid slice of Americana living. Michael Shannon plays Curtis, a construction worker living in rural Ohio with his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and their deaf daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart). They’re a happy family, and although they seek surgery to correct their daughter’s hearing, they do so not because they can’t manage but because she’s not playing with the other kids as much as she could be. Curtis and Samantha’s love for her is summed up in one beautiful moment as they watch her sleep. “I still take off my boots so I won’t wake her up,” Curtis says. “I still whisper,” Sam adds.

But Curtis feels his capacity to be the father he should be is in jeopardy. He starts having dreams in which a storm of biblical proportions is nearing, and it causes his loved ones to attack him. In one dream his dog ferociously bites his arm, and Curtis cages him outside. In another his best friend Dewart (Shannon’s “Boardwalk Empire” costar Shea Whigham) fights him, and Curtis gets him transferred to a different crew at work.

Nichols seamlessly weaves special effects into this simple landscape, blurring the lines between what Curtis perceives and what is really in front of him. For him, dark, rippling clouds are always looming, birds spiral in hypnotic patterns and the rain and lightning is so dense that it seems to engulf us.

The clever aspect of the screenplay is that the terrors don’t just surround Curtis figuratively. His daughter’s disability already gives him pause, but we learn before long that his mother too has spent years of her life in a nursing home suffering from schizophrenia. Is Curtis really suffering a spell, or is he causing his own distress? The movie’s lack of melodrama and careful ambiguity keep us rapt and guessing.

But the physical shelters Curtis builds to block out the imagined ones start to have an impact on his home life in ways he was precisely trying to prevent. When he takes out a loan and uses equipment from work to expand a tornado shelter in his backyard, “Take Shelter” wonderfully pits Curtis’s mentality against his way of life. It’s a powerful metaphor captured in a realistic story.

Chastain’s womanly realism and Shannon’s earthy substance elevate “Take Shelter” to that of an indie Americana masterpiece. Shannon plays much of the film in more reserved moments, but he shows as much intense, insane, outrageous and unbridled range as any actor today or ever. He has a solid, stoic face but eyes that show his mind quivering. His pensive gaze and late night conversations with his wife seem to ask that amidst the home he knows so well, he can’t really be alone, can he?

4 stars

Monsieur Lazhar

A great teacher is capable of showing us that we have to do some of our own learning. The world is bigger than our classroom. “Monsieur Lazhar” is a sweet film about a teacher and students who all have a lot to say, a lot to learn and the truth that we don’t have to be tortured by keeping things to ourselves.

The thing about Bachir Lazhar (the comedian Fellag) is that he’s just a good teacher, not a great one. That alone sets this French Canadian film, one that was nominated for 2011’s Best Foreign Language Oscar, apart from its counterparts. He arranges his students in straight rows after they were already arranged in a communal semi-circle, and he asks them to dictate Balzac, two teaching traits of old fashioned convention that his kids and colleagues both resist.

But these 7th graders need convention in their lives. You see, Lazhar comes to them from Algeria after one student, Simon (Emilien Neron), finds his teacher Martine hanging dead from a rafter inside their classroom. The principal paints the walls and shuffles around the desks, but these kids have baggage now and can’t forget so easily.

The policy of the school seems to be to adhere to the status quo. Talk about your emotions behind closed doors with a school psychologist, act strong and mature, move on, and learn as though nothing has changed. Only Lazhar seems to think these students who are wise beyond their age should still have the opportunity to be kids.

“Monsieur Lazhar” tells a familiar story by turning some of the conventions of the teacher/student coming-of-age drama on its head. This isn’t “Dead Poets Society.” He’s not some liberal, new age teacher. He doesn’t make big scenes or jokes, and he treats his students like children, not adults set on profundity.

Fellag gives Lazhar a pleasant, passive and non-threatening demeanor, one that’s congenial but letting on little of his culture or his past. We learn that he’s actually an Algerian refugee on trial. Like his students, he has baggage he can’t admit or share.

It’s a nuanced dichotomy contained within an interesting and beautiful metaphor. Lazhar gets scolded for slapping a student on the back of the head for disobedience, but he’s told to stay hands off at all times. It reminds me of a great line from a favorite U2 song of mine. “You’ve got to talk without speaking, cry without weeping, scream without raising your voice.” This is a film about learning to overcome those barriers.

3 ½ stars

We Have a Pope

Maybe it’s my cliché mind tinkering away, but I would bet “We Have a Pope” would be a lot funnier and even more insightful if the Cardinal in question was actually Woody Allen. This satire however starts with an interesting premise that somehow finds a way to be very thin and flimsy.

Nanni Moretti’s film starts with the death of the current Pope and the election of a new one. As you may know, the Cardinals are secluded until they can make a decision. There’s you’re movie right there. Take us inside a room that we’ll never enter and stay put. What does happen however is that the out-of-the-blue candidate Melville (Michel Piccoli) is selected, but moments before he is intended to give a blessing to the world, he gets cold feet.

Now this is understandable. To be chosen by God and given stature, power and a new identity would be overwhelming for anyone, least of all someone brought up in church to be humble. And for Melville, there’s got to be a hint of peer pressure there too. He seeks help from a psychologist (Moretti) and yet is unable to find real clarity because the nature of his new identity and the church’s seclusion policies renders him isolated. He finds his only option is to run off and rediscover himself on his own.

But “We Have a Pope” is more interested in a broad satire of the church. It seems content in showing these harmless old men merely being cute, talking about their cell phones, playing cards and holding a volleyball tournament. It provides them with nothing interesting or even spiritual to say, and their montages of frivolity are handled in dainty, stately ways that only provide miniature grace notes of comedy.

In restricting the focus to just Melville and including the Cardinals as comic relief, the movie is about how this one character deals with pressure. But it’s about nothing more broadly, not religion and not even humanity.

The film’s crushing, sanctimonious ending is ultimately confusing if not ambiguous. Not only are we left with no pope, we’re left with no understanding of how tough, or in this case how silly, it is to be one.

2 stars

Wreck-It Ralph

The plight of Wreck-It Ralph was best said by Jessica Rabbit. “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”

“Wreck-It Ralph” is a movie with a killer premise about an 8-bit arcade game villain who wants to be the good guy for once. It’s a cute film with a lot of heart that kids will gobble up, but it doesn’t represent video games in the way I would’ve hoped.

Very much like “Toy Story,” when the arcade closes, all the characters leave their in-game roles and live out lives of their own. They can even leave their own game and interact with others in a central train station hub, better known to us humans as a power strip.

Poor Ralph (John C. Reiley) has been the bad guy in his “Donkey Kong” inspired game for 30 years, and in all that time the townspeople have heaped praise on the game’s hero, Fix-It Felix (Jack McBrayer), and made him live in a garbage dump. In the film’s most clever scene, Ralph seeks help at an AA meeting for video game villains, and Bowser, Blinkie, Zangeef, Dr. Eggman and a stray zombie get him to realize that being a bad guy doesn’t mean you’re a “bad guy.”

But in an effort to win some pride, Ralph leaves his game and first joins a violent and realistic First Person Shooter and then a “Mario Kart” racer, where he helps a glitchy character named Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) win her own in-game acceptance.

“Wreck-It Ralph” is at its best when it’s riffing on games. The references function mostly as Easter Eggs for a nerdy audience brought up on Playstation, but the fun nuances are everywhere in the film’s first half hour, from a PSA featuring Sonic the Hedgehog to a race on the infamous Rainbow Road. Even the animation reflects the way certain game characters move or how background elements can be pixelated and under-developed.

For a movie that’s been given so much care, it’s a shame to see it turn into a vehicle for potty humor and lame puns about candy. The film’s big chases and action sequences feel less like actual levels in a game and more like bland movie set pieces. There’s a gag that involves Laffy Taffys and Fix-It Felix hitting himself in the face with a hammer that feels very low-brow.

And yet “Wreck-It Ralph” is sugary sweet. The characters are perky and optimistic, and Ralph is never anything but loveable. He just gets a bad rap.

I read on Twitter that this was the year that Disney made a Pixar movie and Pixar made a Disney movie (“Brave”), but “Wreck-It Ralph” is not quite “Toy Story.” It needs to level up if it wants to beat that.

3 stars

Cloud Atlas

“Cloud Atlas” opens with an old man muttering under his breath, talking about the juju o’ the bayou, or at least that’s what it sounds like. It’s a super close-up after looking down from the stars, so it feels a little profound, a little silly, a little captivating. Then you realize it’s Tom Hanks with really good makeup, and you realize very quickly this movie is bananas.

“Cloud Atlas” is a wild mess of a movie. It tells six stories over countless centuries, sharing actors and thematic structure, but only just barely narrative. So at times the whole thing is pegged to be philosophical and thought provoking, and then Jim Broadbent learns to drive an SUV and runs over Hugo Weaving wearing drag as they escape from a nursing home.

Whether or not it’s actually about anything is beside the point. It has the same transcendent, sci-fi possibilities and mumbo-jumbo that “The Matrix” did, which was also directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski (the siblings have paired up with “Run Lola Run” director Tom Tykwer), but at the end of the day it’s a fun journey through time with just as much visual imagination.

Describing how the plot functions is an effort in futility, but the movie itself actually does it best. “Each thing is understood moment to moment, but at any moment it could be headed in a different direction.” This may just be the movie accounting for its own jumbled narrative, but that is how “Cloud Atlas” feels. It flits in time, but none of it is particularly dreamlike or even surreal. Each of the six stories, if you broke them apart as they are, are presented linearly.

The only confusing part is the excessive crosscutting that the Wachowskis and Tykwer employ. They may jump from a barbarian attack scene in the dystopian future to the performance of a sonata in 1932 to a sex scene in the 22nd Century to a sight gag or punch line in modern day London. The brilliant thing is that they’re often edited as though they are one scene, completely different in terms of even the mood we’re supposed to feel, but fluid in their pacing and action. At one point when Halle Berry crashes her car off a bridge and plummets into the water, the movie leaves her hanging for nearly 20 minutes before we see her making her escape. To have it happen when it does, a theme of rescue seems to permeate throughout all the other story threads.

“Cloud Atlas” is all about its themes rather than concrete ideas. We start with each character sharing in an unlikely encounter. We see them experience feelings of escape, rescue and discovery, and before long they’ve all suffered loss and hardship, if not action. Voice over narrations, the image of a comet shaped birthmark and miniature Easter eggs connecting the stories suggest that our lives are not our own, that our spirits carry through generations, but because the stories never truly intersect, do they mean anything beyond wispy ideas?

I don’t think it matters much, because the movie’s lushness sweeps us up in its visuals and ideas. We see futuristic cityscapes, treacherous mountain ranges, majestic long shots on the high sea and colorful rooms that materialize with possibilities right before our eyes.

On a technical level alone, “Cloud Atlas” is a remarkable achievement. The running time is nearly three hours, but because the stories are so out of sequence we’re not checking our watch awaiting the next one to start. We’re mystified by the makeup that makes Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant at times unrecognizable. We’re moved by the complex and exuberant performances of Jim Broadbent and Doona Bae, a South Korean actress who fully owns a rare lead part for Asians in a big budget movie.

Something that was more art house would also be more metaphorical in its ideas and imagery. The Wachowskis and Tykwer however put all their brainstorming right into the mouths of their characters. So moment to moment we get a line that resonates on an intellectual level, another that comes from a crazed Mad Hatter and seems laughable and another that is intentionally laughable. These ideas would be a slog if it jammed them down our throats, but perhaps like the way the filmmakers think the world operates, these possibilities are released like spirits floating in the movie’s universe.

I imagine I’ll see “Cloud Atlas” again very shortly, not because it’s a dense movie that needs to be unraveled, but because it’s a magical movie that makes it fun to be insightful.

3 ½ stars

Seven Psychopaths

“Seven Psychopaths” proves you should never judge a movie by its title. Playwright turned movie director Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges”) starts with the title and knowingly ropes you in to a movie you both did and didn’t expect it to be.

It’s a movie about movies, it’s about writers with writer’s block, it’s about how psychopathic we must be to enjoy a movie about psychopaths, and it’s one of the more twistedly clever movies of the year.

Colin Farrell as Marty is not one of the movie’s seven psychopaths, but he must be crazy to think he can get any work done on a screenplay when he’s an alcoholic writer and Irishman. All he has so far is the title, “Seven Psychopaths,” which is good enough for everyone, because a title like that should write itself. But he doesn’t know who the psychopaths are, and he doesn’t want them to be violent or the movie to be a mindless bloodbath. One of them, he thinks, could be a Buddhist.

But this isn’t good enough for Billy (Sam Rockwell), a crook who kidnaps dogs and returns them for reward money along with his partner Hans (Christopher Walken). Billy suggests one of the psychopaths could be based on a local serial killer called the Jack of Diamonds, who goes around killing members of crime syndicates. All the plots inevitably intertwine when Billy kidnaps crime boss Charlie’s (Woody Harrelson) shih tzu puppy and he comes looking for them.

The twist of “Seven Psychopaths” however is that this is the set up. The title itself is a ploy. Suddenly on the run, Marty wonders that if this were the story of his movie, what if the second half was just three guys sitting in the desert and talking? The movie calls attention to itself in the biggest way possible. It’s writing the movie as it goes, recognizing the over-stylized shootout isn’t as fun or as funny as it seems, showing the seams of its plot and acknowledging that even a sincere attempt at life lessons can be phony.

It’s not quite “Pulp Fiction” because it has its own set of rules instead of none at all. It’s not quite “Snatch” because it’s smarter than that and only uses the movie’s ideas as a template for parody. And it’s not quite “Adaptation” because at the end of the day this is still a screwball, blood-drenched mob comedy.

“Seven Psychopaths” is its own movie. It’s got layers, as it says. It’s a movie inside itself that doesn’t play out in ways you would expect, but then does on a technicality.

At its core, the film works because McDonagh’s dialogue isn’t funny just because it’s self-aware, and it doesn’t waste the talent on screen just to make a point about movies like this. Woody Harrelson is probably best, using obscenely large guns and other props like a wheelchair to always teeter on comedic and menacing and make his own legacy as an iconic and memorable movie villain.

And McDonagh isn’t just a stylistic copycat. He backs away from most of the pop culture references and focuses carefully on the proper aesthetic of the action comedy dream sequence and how he can tweak it. Take note of the maudlin score and storybook monologue during a montage telling the story of Zacharia (Tom Waits), another serial killer specializing in killing serial killers who acted with a Bonnie Parker partner in crime and fell in love.

The question is whether or not “Seven Psychopaths” earns its stripes. The movie is so self-aware that it even calls itself out on its own trap. These characters can’t necessarily be liked, the movie really can only end one way and the insights really can only be skin deep. If “Seven Psychopaths” is a movie within a movie, it seems to say how you couldn’t possibly enjoy a movie like this as you’re watching it.

3 stars

CIFF Review: Post Tenebras Lux

The Latin phrase “Post Tenebras Lux” translates to “light, after darkness,” which to me implies something like “clarity and understanding, after obscurity.” But Carlos Reygadas’s (“Silent Light”) new film provides only murky ideas and feelings. It’s an arresting film of occasional beauty and horror, but most of it is lost in the clouds.

The movie has no story. It’s a dreamscape of emotions, fantasies and nightmares. The film is set in the rural mountainside and focuses on a wealthy family of four. Juan (Adolfo Jimenez Castro) and Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo) have two adorable toddlers, Rut and Eleazar. The young girl Rut is seen running through a muddy field before a thunderstorm chasing after dogs and cows. Eleazar is seen taking off his diaper and hurling it across the room, and in another scene wearing a Spiderman outfit and talking about Peter Parker.

These moments are beautiful, but they’re aimless. They exist out of time as though they are simply dreams or memories.

Contrast these with the more disturbing images. Juan and Natalia go to a bathhouse in France and participate in an orgy, but even this does not seem real, with dozens of naked bodies and faces simply sitting and staring through the haze of the room as disturbing noises penetrate our surroundings. In another scene, Juan scolds a whining dog and then beats it mercilessly by slamming its head into the patio floor.

For me the film represents the fleeting nature of time, our ever changing memories that blur moments and reflect back at our best and worst. The problem is that it’s very likely the film will mean something else to you. Reygadas gets distracted with momentary glimpses of kids in England playing rugby or an animated devil with a toolbox stealthily invading someone’s home. They’re surreal, supernatural plot devices that aim to elevate the ordinary but fail to focus on any concrete ideas.

And it’s all seen through a refracted, convex camera lens, blurring the frame’s edges and causing us to see double out in nature. It starts as a unique aesthetic, but you wonder why Reygadas couldn’t make the film look dreamlike without filtering it all through a kaleidoscope.

It reflects the broader difficulty of “Post Tenebras Lux,” a film that enchants in its distinctly skewed view of the world but ultimately clouds what we had hoped to see more clearly.

3 stars