Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray Review: Reversal of Fortune (1990)

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“I could do anything to you in your sleep.” 

A twisted hypothetical that's played for laughs by Nancy Travis and Mike Myers in 1993's underrated comedic thriller So I Married an Axe Murderer becomes a sinister threat that lives in the back of our mind in filmmaker Barbet Schroeder's Reversal of Fortune.

A dramatization of one of the most shocking and notorious court cases of the late twentieth century, the film – based on the book by defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz – puts us immediately off balance. Plunging the viewer right into the heart of the crime (if, indeed, there's been one), within its first five minutes, we start to question just what exactly the ever-shady, emotionally detached Claus von Bülow (Jeremy Irons) did or did not do to his socialite wife Sunny (Glenn Close), that's left the woman in a coma from which she will never awaken. 

The second near-fatal incident to send her to the hospital, almost one year to the day of her first (which might have been an overdose), in its aftermath, Sunny's grown children from her previous marriage hire their own detectives to investigate their stepfather. Gathering enough evidence for a trial, the children and their experts secure Claus von Bülow's swift, thirty-year conviction for attempted murder. 

In nearly every other case – the ones that don't involve the rich, of course – this is where the story would end. Ask any policeman who the first suspect in an attack on a woman is and they'll tell you it's her husband, boyfriend, or ex-lover without batting an eye. But is it that simple here? 

A hypodermic needle encrusted with insulin found in a black medical bag among Claus' possessions was the trial's smoking gun but whose needle is it really? And what about that bag? A sleazy drug dealer to the rich (played with slicked-back yuppie swagger by Fisher Stevens) claims it belonged to Sunny's son, as in the same son who employed the detective who conducted an unlawful search and “found” it among his step-father's things. 

Was he procuring drugs for his mother? Did the hypoglycemic Sunny use insulin just like she used aspirin – which she popped like Tic-Tacs – or alcohol, which she drank like a fish while celebrating Christmas? And what about the timing of Sunny's collapse, which seems to have occurred just when the couple was talking about divorcing after Claus violated their extramarital understanding by having an affair with a woman (Julie Hagerty) who moved in the same circles that they did? 

All of these questions fascinate the brilliant yet morally flexible lawyer Alan Dershowitz (a fine Ron Silver), who Claus contacts to handle his appeal. Initially turning the case down because he thinks it's a no-win and the man is guilty, at the same time, this question of whether or not the wealthy deserve equal due process under the law appeals to Alan on an academic level. What right do the rich have to hire and build their own case with their own police to exact the justice they feel they deserve? Even if he's guilty as sin, was Claus railroaded? And if he can be railroaded, doesn't that mean it's worse for the rest of us or it might be if Alan were to leave him to rot?

Working with his best and brightest legal students, along with his colleague and ex-lover (well played by the criminally underutilized Annabella Sciorra), Alan uses Claus to finance his pro-bono work but then discovers that he not only doubts much of the evidence used to convict his client but also believes the man is innocent.

Fueled by the eerily objective narration from a nearly beyond the grave Sunny (a terrific Glenn Close), director Barbet Schroeder crafts a creepy, biting satire of the amoral, tawdry, and privileged in the '80s. Yet Reversal of Fortune plays with even more sinister nuance, calculated menace, and resigned malaise in today's era of a president who skirts justice at every turn. Furthermore, thirty-five years after Dershowitz wrote the book that At Close Range screenwriter Nick Kazan adapted for the screen that turned him into a complex crusader, now Trump too has the advantage of Dershowitz's legendary defense capabilities for himself.

But while all of that makes the film more meta in this new, immaculate Blu-ray release from Warner Archive, which coincides with its thirtieth anniversary, the biggest reason to watch Reversal of Fortune in 2020 is the same as it was in 1990 when Jeremy Irons walked away with the Academy Award for Best Actor for his astonishingly unnerving performance.

Finding a single vowel in each word to accentuate by stretching it past the breaking point of his British baritone, every syllable that Irons says onscreen as Claus sounds as dazzlingly extemporaneous as it does lived-in and rehearsed. Although some might argue it's too affected, this approach fits von Bülow perfectly. A different kind of villain, in Irons' Claus, we're faced with someone who's as much a devious yet innocent man caught between a rock and a hard place as he is the guiltiest figure who's ever lived. 

Adopting an artful way of holding his cigarette like a sword and leaning back in each scene like a rattlesnake ready to strike, this is an actor at his most masterfully self-possessed. Taking his portrayal of Claus right to the edge of Niagara Falls, Irons cheekily sends him over in a barrel every so often, before he quickly dries off, and climbs right back to the top again. A staggering accomplishment all around, he never lets his performance descend into the realm of caricature. 

Making us more sympathetic towards Claus concerning the question of his guilt at the exact same time that we become even more repulsed by his true feelings about women, once Kazan, Schroeder, and Irons unearth suspicions about previous deaths that have followed Claus to the United States from England, they leave us reeling.

A sardonic, coal-black study of the upper crust, as well as the double standards of the law when it comes to the different economic classes, Reversal of Fortune is an uneasy film about good and evil that we can't easily shake. Angering, delighting, shocking, and frustrating viewers in equal measure (as much for the questions it answers as the ones it doesn't), this movie gets under our skin and attacks the bloodstream. Leaving us obsessed, it takes over like an injection that may or may not have been administered in our sleep.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Military Wives (2019)

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Starting and disbanding a knitting club on the very first night it meets after it becomes extremely clear that they can't knit, in the new film from director Peter Cattaneo, the military wives of the fictional British military base of Flitcroft realize they must look for another way to pass the time while their husbands and partners are overseas in Afghanistan.

Taking the suggestion of a young, newly married arrivee on the base to start a singing club, much like the straight-laced company colonel's wife Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Lisa (Sharon Horgan), the sergeant major's wife and laid-back new chair of the base's social committee disagree about everything else, they greatly differ in their approach to the new activity.

Threatening to make the choir as short-lived as the knitting club, whereas Kate wants to teach the women to sing by formal numbered scale, Lisa knows that the quickest way to improve morale and ease the women's minds is to get them lost in the words of a beloved pop song. Eventually putting egos aside and finding a happy medium between the two wildly different styles, as the voices of their diverse choir of women from all backgrounds begins to meld together in a lovely harmony, Kate and Lisa begin to discover that they are more alike than they are dissimilar.

A pleasant if predictable trifle written by Rachel Tunnard and Rosanne Flynn and now available on demand and for free on Hulu, the 2019 film is inspired by the formation of the very first military wives choir as well as the second one, which was chronicled in the popular British television series The Choir: Military Wives. Made with a clear market in mind, because that series struck such a chord with viewers that afterward, 75 choirs (serving 2,300 people) started to spring up on British military bases both in the U.K. and overseas, the film will undoubtedly appeal to members of the military and their families, regardless of the country for which they fight.

Constructed with the noblest of intentions, Wives benefits from its authentic surroundings and the research the screenwriters did in making sure they get the little details right when it comes to life on a military base. Yet as important as it is to pay tribute to the real sacrifices being made by the families of soldiers who don't receive nearly as much credit as they deserve for the vital role they play in serving their country, Military Wives is as bland as it is forgettable. Formulaic in terms of both its script development — which follows the three act structure to such an extent that you can almost set your watch by it — and when it comes to its prosaic characters, in the end, the reason Wives works as well as it does is thanks to its marvelous cast.

Giving the role of Kate more intriguing contradictions than can be found on the page, Kristin Scott Thomas is a master at thawing the edges of the specific brand of ice queen she frequently plays in order to shatter us in a wordless scene when she watches old home video footage of the son she'd lost on a previous military tour. Balancing out Kate and helping to give the film buoyancy when it needs it most, the lively, effortlessly funny Sharon Horgan spars very well with Scott Thomas and propels the movie forward towards the women's inevitable "big show" at the Royal Albert Hall.

Supremely skilled in the subgenre of dramedy, as evidenced throughout his filmography where his ensemble casts of characters frequently find themselves through the performing arts — from striptease in The Full Monty to theater in the underrated Lucky Break or music once again in his American crossover attempt The Rocker, director Peter Cattaneo's steady hand keeps everything afloat and makes the shallow work seem deeper than it actually is.

Still an altogether amiable picture, if you don't go in with the highest of expectations, a burning desire to really connect with the characters beyond the periphery, or the hope that you'll think about it much — if at all — when it's over, Military Wives plays very well as an adequate time waster made with assembly line efficiency.

Hitting all of the notes you'd expect it to, Wives follows the paradigm that's been practically sewn into our DNA thanks to generations of underdog stories made by the House of Mouse and others since their rise in the 1970s. And while it's great that military wives are being celebrated onscreen, in the end, Wives' narrative success is as short-lived as its filmic knitting club, which reaffirms my belief that the movie would've been better off as an original solo instead of a mere duet of everything else that came before it.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: Shooting the Mafia (2019)

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"The mafia kills. So does silence." The words appear on a sign at an anti-mafia rally early on Kim Longinotto's eye-opening documentary Shooting the Mafia and also serve as a great tribute to the photographer at the center of the filmmaker's biographical portrait, Letizia Battaglia, who — as the translation of her surname suggests — battles the mob by refusing to adhere to the code of silence that has kept them in power in Sicily for so long.

If a person goes missing in Corleone, Sicily, Longinotto's film informs us, no one says a word for fear of retribution. Ruling not only the meat, fish, fruit, and vegetable markets but also the funeral industry, we learn that if a person can no longer pay the mob to keep their loved one buried, they'll simply dig up their bones from the cemetery to make room for a family that can line their pockets.

Turning her lens on the economic devastation and political corruption caused by La Cosa Nostra, as the country's first female photographer hired by a daily newspaper in the form of the liberal L'Ora in the 1970s, Battaglia used her camera to prove that when it comes to the mob, fear is a luxury that Sicily can simply not afford.

An ambitious, sprawling but too often vague and disjointed chronicle of both Battaglia and the mafia's impact on Sicily over the past fifty years, it's a nonetheless fascinating introduction to a courageous iconoclast who picked up a camera at forty and was changed by it to the point that — looking back — feels she wasn't a real person before she had it in her hands.

Sharing her recollections of growing up in a world dominated by men, you feel her frustration when she discusses being locked up by her father as a beautiful teen to the point that she couldn't go out onto the balcony in case she would tempt male passersby. Later contrasting this with a spicier memory of meeting one of her many lovers on the balcony after her mercurial husband had fallen asleep, you get the sense of how being controlled and yearning to break free from men who wanted to silence her prepared her for the next forty years of her life.

Missing huge gaps of biographical information and bafflingly light on specific details including the years certain events happened, although she uses moving clips from classic Italian films to help bring Battaglia's memories to life, Longinotto struggles to tell a cohesive story throughout and seems uncertain how much of Battaglia's life to go into as opposed to her work.

Opening on Battaglia's stark, artful, hellish portraits of the aftermath of brutal mob slayings and simple yet stunning images of Corleone residents striving to live their lives under mafia rule, the film presents us with half intriguing, half murky information about our subject as well as Sicily. At its most gripping in the second half of the film when it charts how judges Falcone and Borsellino put their lives on the line to bring the mafia to justice in a historic trial with hundreds of defendants, Shooting the Mafia works extraordinarily well when it zeroes in on one specific timeline.

Unsure what story she truly wants to tell, when Longinotto focuses on the downfall of two of Corleone's most notorious mob bosses, we're left with the startling revelation that this piece of the puzzle is actually far more interesting than anything that had come before it. An intriguing if narratively unsuccessful documentary about a heroic photographer who breaks Sicily's years of silence to shout at the mafia as loud as she can with each click of her camera, I only wish the film had been as clear cut, laser focused, and determined as the woman at its center who refuses to be contained.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: The Warrior Queen of Jhansi (2019)

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It's all fun and filmmaking until someone almost loses an eye.

After years of building up her comfort level on horseback and getting in fighting shape to portray The Warrior Queen of Jhansi in the script she wrote alongside her filmmaker mother Swati Bhise and Olivia Emden, dancer-actress Devika Bhise knew it was time to get even more serious about her training. Studying Kalaripayattu, the world’s oldest martial art form with Jackie Chan’s instructor Gopakumar Gurukkal, Devika Bhise dove headfirst into her lessons so literally that she required emergency surgery after a shard of metal weaponry flew into her eye.

While most people would've jumped ship at this point, Bhise didn't let the injury sideline her for long. Latching onto another weapon — the long, thin, whip-like sword urumi — Bhise got right back on the horse in a move that no doubt would've impressed Rani Lakshmibai, the real life heroine she brings to life in Warrior Queen.

A headstrong commoner turned wife, queen, and widow of the maharajah by the time she’s in her early twenties, Rani finds a new calling when the royally aligned, corrupt mercantile trading corporation the British East India Company tries to steal back the land they'd given to India and claim Jhansi as their own following her husband's death.

Going from widowed queen to warrior general when diplomatic measures fail, Rani Lakshmibai begins training the women of Jhansi to fight in order to stand up to British tyranny and assert their independence, ultimately leading her countrywomen (and men) into war in producer turned first time feature filmmaker Swati Bhise's exciting if overwrought biopic.

Cramming hundreds of years of backstory into the film's slightly confusing first act, Warrior Queen is ready for action from the very first frame. In fact, hindered by a weak narrative throughline, Bhise’s film is so eager to get to the battlefield that — prioritizing conflict over character — it forgoes the vital step of endearing us to Rani, which is a major problem since she's the one at the heart of the picture marching us into the fray.

While chronicling Rani's efforts to unite her people as Jhansi's revolutionary war against the British gets underway in the 1850s makes the film seem like a natural fit for American audiences from an academic perspective, Queen suffers from the same affliction that most war movies do in that it's hard to care about characters that we don't know know very well.

Though her early actions, such as her bold refusal to shave her head (as is the archaic custom for women in mourning), speak volumes, the film doesn't trust itself enough to rely on more small acts of rebellion to help define our leading lady throughout.

Preferring instead to have Rani constantly voice her thoughts and goals aloud in anachronistic twenty-first century platitudes, while the undeniably well-intentioned feminist passion project wears its heart in its shots, the push-and-pull it faces between the film’s setting in the past and the script written in the present proves to be an even bigger battle than the one onscreen against the British.

Uncertain of precisely which tone it is that Bhise wishes to strike, the film opens like an epic from the 1950s (and indeed the last Rani Lakshmibai biopic, The Tiger and the Flame was made in 1953), but then veers into modern Wonder Woman territory as soon as our queen becomes a warrior. Collaborating with the stunt coordinators who worked on the Patty Jenkins helmed superhero film, Marcus Shakesheff and Glenn Marks turn Devika Bhise's Indian Joan of Arc into a wonder woman on horseback for the film's impressive battle sequences.

Veering away from the frenetic urgency of war shot in a breathless contemporary style to a classically framed walk-and-talk as we see Rani’s royal side, just when Bhise's film starts to draw us in, Warrior Queen loses its momentum by drifting back and forth unevenly between the two modes of filmmaking.

Giving Rani an ally and potential love interest in the form of Robert Ellis (Ben Lamb), a sympathetic British envoy who's inspired by the beautiful royal, as well as linking her plight as queen to that of Queen Victoria in England (played by Jodhi May), the screenwriters attempt to augment their one-note heroine in a study of compare and contrast. At this point, however, it's too little too late.

A handsomely photographed, thematically appealing tale of an underdog heroine standing up to injustice (as well as any man who crosses her path), while it's fine on the surface, the awkwardly paced and clunkily scripted film fails to find the rhythm it needs to work as well as it should.

With little in the way of staying power, thanks to the lack of a real connection to its titular heroine, although it's entertaining enough for a casual viewing, once the final credits roll, The Warrior Queen of Jhansi vanishes quickly from our minds. And unfortunately in this case, unlike the impressively skilled Devika Bhise, we’re unable to blame our filmic amnesia on something as cool as learning to fight and taking a shard of metal to the eye.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement DVD Review: Un Traductor (2018)

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"Are you a doctor already?"

Having quit medical school after one semester to become a professor of Russian language and literature, the last place that Cuban academic Malin (Rodrigo Santoro) thought he’d end up was a hospital.

"I’m working on a doctorate," he tells his young son Javier (Jorge Carlos Perez Herrera) who's just as confused as he is when Malin's classes are suddenly canceled by the government. "I'm not a doctor."

Assigned to work as a translator for the Soviet patients and families of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster who've been sent to Cuba for treatment, to say that Malin is out of his depth is an understatement, especially after he learns that he's been assigned the children's ward.

Forced to explain to a mother that nothing more can be done for her daughter his first night on the job, Malin initially walks away from his assignment working alongside Gladys (beautifully played by Maricel Álvarez).

A nurse who's a fellow outsider simply because she's from Argentina, after Malin learns that Gladys has covered for him when his absence is reported to the ministry, he returns to the hospital and gradually begins to apply the same tactics he uses as a professor and a father to his work with the children.

Bringing in some of Javier's favorite books for story time to give them an escape from the gloomily lit green-gray hospital, Malin also provides the children with an outlet for their feelings by inviting them to-write or draw on the back of what we gather are the pages of his long in process thesis.

Refusing to either play up the tragedy of the heartbreaking situation or paint Malin as a Patch Adams style saint, which is quite a feat considering that the film was directed by the real life Malin's sons – Rodrigo and Sebastián Barriuso in their feature filmmaking debut – the multilayered award-winning Cuban-Canadian feature is filled with complexity.

Exacerbated by his schedule as he works all night and sleeps all day, Malin starts to see the world with the same life or death urgency of the hospital while going through an existential crisis of his own. Shutting out the world which, with the fall of the Berlin wall has brought hunger and a gas shortage to Cuba, Malin's pregnant wife Isona (Yoandra Suárez) is forced to juggle all of the duties of the household and try to take on the role of both parents to Javier.

While everything comes crashing down on the characters all at once in a predictable third act dramatic conflict, screenwriter Lindsay Gossling gets credit for not only expanding Un Traductor's point of view but also reminding the viewer that the myth that we can have it all isn't gender specific, as the formerly devoted husband and father starts neglecting his wife and son.

Belittling his wife's work as an art curator by contrasting it with the hospital – somehow forgetting his own background in the humanities as well – the filmmakers foreshadow some of the drama to come onscreen and off for Malin and Isona.

An involving chronicle of an ordinary man trying to make a difference on the most basic human level, although Un Traductor's ambition gets the best of the film at times by touching on socioeconomic and historical subplots that it never fully explores, it's still an impressive achievement, not to mention an all-around terrific feature filmmaking debut.

Though universal in its appeal overall, Rodrigo and Sebastián Barriuso's film is nonetheless hindered by the fact that its success is dependent upon how much you know about that era in history.

Relying on big historical events like the fall of the wall to deduce the year the film takes place, while the absence of specifics only strengthens the hospital arc by highlighting the way so many strangers work side-by-side to save a life, at the same time its lack of context in framing it for today's audiences does lessen its reach.

Instantly transporting the viewer to Cuba, M.I. Littin-Menz's stellar cinematography effectively illustrates the contrast of life for Malin in and outside the hospital at the end of the cold war.

Featuring a tender, moving performance by Santoro alongside a strong supporting cast (including a memorable Nikita Semenov as one of the young patients), Un Traductor is newly available on DVD and digital from Film Movement and will be premiering on Film Movement Plus in the future.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review - Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti (2017)

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Artists have an overwhelming need to express themselves, to let pain or pleasure flow out of them like water, sublimating it until it becomes something new.

Yet as hard as it is for an artist to find the time, courage, and opportunity – financial or otherwise – to create, it's even harder to be the person whose job it is to stifle their own needs and individuality in order to support the artist and inspire their work.

For once artists apply their own meaning to the life of another, soon their support system become less a subject than a stepping stone used to reach a creative destination.

From the Mona Lisa to Zelda Fitzgerald to Hitchcock's cool blondes to Clapton's "Layla," muses have always been the most enigmatic and compelling figures in art, sadly because we seldom know who they really are as people outside the perspective of their "creator."

And this is the case in Edouard Deluc's Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti with Tehura (Tuheï Adams), who inspires penniless French painter Paul Gauguin (Vincent Cassel) after he leaves behind his wife and children – whom we imagine played the role of muse before – and moves to Tahiti in 1891 in order to follow his inner calling of life as a true artist.

Not bothering to give us much in the way of information about Paul Gauguin or his family before he sets off on his journey, even though the picture – credited to five writers – is based on Gauguin's controversial memoirs, I went into Deluc's film knowing very little about the artist and came out knowing roughly the same amount.

Uninterested in crafting a traditional biopic, Gauguin serves up a snapshot of the painter's time spent on the island during his first, alternately perilous and prolific voyage where, following an impromptu proposition made in a single conversation, he agrees to "wed" the beautiful Tehura who would become the subject of some of his most famous paintings.

Exceedingly well played by talented newcomer Adams, Tehura's role as the optimistic, good hearted, exotic young native who inspires a white man is reminiscent of Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas in Terrence Malick's 2005 masterpiece, The New World. Yet although Malick's movie seems to have influenced Deluc's in terms of its overall approach, unfortunately Kilcher's heroine is far more three dimensional than Gauguin's poorly penned Tehura.

Having collapsed following a heart attack with complications from diabetes, after Gauguin (portrayed by charismatic character actor Vincent Cassel) takes Tehura as his bride, his health woes seem to subside. Invigorated, Gauguin begins painting the young woman so often that he is forced to improvise when he can no longer afford or find any remaining canvas on the island.

Inspiring his doctor with his newfound vitality, just as Tehura's smiling, supportive presence starts to turn everything around for Gauguin (at least temporarily), the film starts to go wrong.

Little more than a highlight reel of island life, as the co-writer and director flirts with but fails to explore the way that Europeans would exploit or idealize the exoticism of islanders – especially Gauguin who turned his relationship with a teenage girl into currency – it becomes apparent that Deluc had many ideas he wasn't quite sure how to bring to life.

Glossing over or romanticizing Gauguin's flaws as quirks, such as the demands placed on Tehura where the lack of food or rest (as he keeps her posing for hours on end) are the means used to justify his artistic ends, the film misses the opportunity to examine the imbalance of power between artist and muse as well as husband and wife.

Vacuous but beautifully shot by cinematographer Pierre Cottereau, although the gifted actors do their best to make the silence count, Voyage loses its hold on the audience by failing to delve deeper into Tehura and Gauguin's past or present to reveal what this time together in Tahiti really meant to them both on a personal level.

Trying to remedy this late into the picture, since the film is imbued with a largely romantic arc, Deluc delves into the jealousy and paranoia Gauguin has regarding the handsome, more age-appropriate neighbor who bonds with Tehura over time. But even though he dares to show us a darker side to the artist as he locks his bride indoors to keep her from leaving once her formerly infectious smile starts to fade, Deluc also locks up the point-of-view that matters most when it comes to Tehura.

Unfolding like a leisurely paced Malick movie, while those looking for any substantive information about Paul Gauguin will have to spend some time actually researching him as I did, the film will still appeal thanks to the always reliable Cassel and an enigmatic, largely silent, Mona Lisa-like performance by Adams who speaks volumes with a single glance.

And as our eponymous lead’s personality begins to change, we watch as she does, still wishing in vain for the painter to open up yet knowing that he won't, not because he doesn't want to but perhaps because he fears that if he does he'll have nothing left to express – about either of them – through his art.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Lizzie (2018)

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More than just the brutality of the crime – the double murder of her father and stepmother with an axe – or the socioeconomics and the setting and the fact that it shocked New England high society in 1892, the reason that the Lizzie Borden saga has captured our attention for over a century is the exact same reason that she was acquitted of the crime.

Namely, because – whether back then to an all-male jury or even today given the gender of most killers we see on the news – it’s damn near impossible to compute how a girl could evolve from "sugar and spice and everything nice" to "Lizzie Borden took an axe." Yes, even nursery rhymes couldn't resist an homage to Borden's "forty whacks."

A longtime passion project of producer and star Chloë Sevigny, this daring feminist retelling of one of America’s most notorious murder mysteries sets out to answer those questions and also capture, as producer Liz Destro reveals, "the loneliness of being an educated and ambitious woman at the time."

Working in a number of theories from a wealth of Borden biographies Sevigny gave her screenwriter friend Bryce Kass as well as details gleaned in a visit to Borden's home and community of Fall River, Massachusetts to lure him aboard the project, the subsequent film from The Boy helmer Craig William Macneill manages to do the same.

With cinematographer Noah Greenberg's "slow, creeping zooms that create a sense of claustrophobia" captured on vintage lenses that give even the darkest of subject matter an intentionally softer, John Singer Sargent-esque painterly feel, we feel as though we've stepped back in time and into Lizzie's shoes.

Purposely framing characters off to the side and taking the corners tighter voyeuristically, in the words of Greenberg, "as the camera follows Lizzie throughout the house," we get the impression that the walls are closing in on Borden to the point that even when the most likely undiagnosed epileptic woman isn't having an attack, it feels like she could at any moment.

Reminiscent of the way that as Chloë Sevigny notes "women of the time...were virtual prisoners in their homes," under what she reinforces and the film implies through the characters of Lizzie's domineering father and uncle as "patriarchal rule," for Lizzie Borden, "the only way to get out of that house was marriage or death."

Deemed an old maid at age thirty-two (similar to her older sister Emma, played by Kim Dickens), when the headstrong Lizzie manages to twist her strict father's arm long enough, an occasional evening out at the local theater has become her one reprieve, even though it's frowned upon in society to go out unaccompanied.

A lonely outcast who spends the rest of her time with her birds, reading, or reading to her birds, Lizzie gets a friend where she least expects it with the arrival of Bridget Sullivan, a young housemaid played by Kristen Stewart.

Cutting right through their differences in class or status, the women only grow closer as they feel the metaphorical noose tighten around their necks in a house run with fear and abuse by Andrew Borden (Jamey Sheridan).

And while both actresses are outstanding, without the benefit of much dialogue or a character nearly as well-documented as Sevigny's nonetheless richly complex Lizzie, in the hands of another, the subservient Bridget could've easily been overpowered by Sevigny.

Yet, creating a fully realized individual, Stewart – incidentally the first person they imagined in the role – turns in one of her strongest recent performances as the housemaid whose relationship with Lizzie surprises them both when it turns romantic.

From anonymous threatening notes to a shady uncle, although red herrings abound as we lead up to the double murder and Macneill and Kass throw the audience a few curve balls in various subplots (including some that either feel contrived or don't go anywhere), Lizzie isn't afraid to take an absolute stance on the crime itself.

Leaving ambiguity in the past, in a bravado sequence that not only commands the viewer's attention but is also worthy of greater feminist analysis, the film – which opened with the discovery of the crime before backtracking six months – dares to go back in time once again after Lizzie's arrest, wherein we see the way the murders were carried out within this particular version of the tale.

A jaw-dropping finale, unfortunately, despite the high caliber performances and gorgeous cinematography, Lizzie stumbles greatly in its pacing. Succeeding a little too well in establishing Borden's home as an intellect draining prison, needless to say that for a movie about a legendary suspected axe murderer, it's a bad sign when the only one hundred and five minute film nearly put this viewer to sleep twice.

In a missed opportunity to augment its thesis even more, aside from a few cursory scenes, Lizzie largely overlooks the points-of-view of the other women in the house from Lizzie's stepmother Abby (played by Fiona Shaw) to her sister Emma which could've helped inject the already feminist work with even greater understanding of what it was like for women in the era, beyond Lizzie and Bridget.

All the same, anchored by its cast and first rate technical specs (including top notch production design which believably swapped out Massachusetts for its Savannah, Georgia location shoot), this ambitiously made, surprisingly empathetic passion project takes a literal and figurative axe to the Victorian period. I only wish it would've either done the same to the running time or spent a little more time trying to give Lizzie more life.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Netflix Movie Review: The Angel (2018)

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"When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself." - Jacques Yves Cousteau

For spies, access (to people as well as information) is everything. And as the son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser who would – following Nasser's heart attack – quickly become the special adviser and Secretary General for Nasser's former Vice President and successor, Anwar Sadat, Ashraf Marwan's access to everything was extraordinary.

Inspired by (as the production notes describe) the "failed chicken farmer" Juan Pujol Garcia who became a British and German double agent to undermine the Nazis in World War II, Marwan initially reaches out to the Israeli intelligence organization, the Mossad when he's a husband, father, and university student in England.

Although he’s blown off at the first, eight months following Nasser's passing – just when he's begun to form a close alliance with Sadat – Marwan is startled when the Mossad follows up, tracking him down from England to Egypt.

Hoping to prevent another war, after Sadat and his advisers begin making plans to take back the land that Israel had claimed when they defeated "the combined forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan" in 1967’s Six Day War, Marwan begins selling secrets to his Israeli handler "Alex" aka Danny.

Fearing for his family's safety as well as his own, although he enlists the help of some friends, including beautiful British actress Diana Ellis to snap a photo or provide cover as a faux mistress, as Sadat's plans and war games escalate, so does the danger for the spy code named "The Angel."

Filled with as much plot and background data as one of Marwan's reports (including an opening voice-over that quickly sums up an entire war), while this approach does unfortunately hold us at an arm's length since we're never able to stop long enough to get a true sense of the people behind the pages handed from one man to the next, it's fascinating stuff regardless.

Anchored by the compelling Dutch actor Marwan Kenzari, who costarred with his Mossad handler played by Toby Kebbell in 2016's Ben Hur (which undoubtedly helped their chemistry), Kenzari's affecting, multilayered, largely internal portrayal helps add a deeper sense of struggle to the goings on.

Giving us an in depth look at the responsibilities faced by a man who has begun to excel at deception, even for the noblest of reasons, The Angel works as well as it does, in large part because we believe Kenzari – regardless of which role he's playing when and to whom – as a husband, spy, or adviser.

Alluding to a gambling habit, money problems, and trust issues with his wife, Marwan's love of western culture as a student in England seems clear early on. However the film's juxtaposition of his resentment at the way he's treated by Nasser with his subsequent call to Mossad leaves the viewer with more questions about Marwan as well as his initial impulse to pick up the phone.

Although he matures and changes before our eyes, we find ourselves wanting to know more about his thought processes beyond some of the film's key expository lines, penned by Spy Game and Children of Men screenwriter David Arata for The Iceman director Ariel Vromen.

Hoping to, as he revealed in the production notes, "try to make it as realistic and visceral as possible" in the way the we see "the journey of one man, where he starts, [and] where he's planning to go," Vromen drew upon Ben Affleck's Argo for inspiration, as well as Steven Spielberg's underrated Munich.

While prior to the film I was more familiar with the end of Marwan's story (which is still in need of investigation and has only become timelier and more suspicious over the last ten years), The Angel offers a fast-paced, exciting, well made depiction of everything he'd done decades earlier to lead to roughly forty years of peace.

And needless to say, with results like those, even if we occasionally find ourselves wanting to know more about not only our lead but also the people and places glossed over throughout, in the end – and like most spies – we're grateful to The Angel for the information as well as the access.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.