Reviews

. . . I find the producer/writer/director/star attractive in a weird way, and I liked the sand-colored shirt/smock/jacket he wears in that looooog outdoors at early evening scene with the girl so fetching that I had it copied for myself. And I look great in it. So thanks for making the movie, Andrew.

'"Lazy Eye" is terse, polished, understated but deeply felt. "Gay" films usually ask viewers to cut them slack, to allow the makers expressive leeway we don't give other films. Lazy Eye stands up proudly and lays down its cards calmly. It compresses the emotional range of a novel as the very best short stories do: Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain does that; so do stories by De Maupassant, Fitzgerald, Katherine Anne Porter, Philip Roth. It's a small film with big things tightly rolled inside it.

Dark Horse Comics is the big exception of the graphic novel world. Instead of creating their books with exploitation in mind from the gitgo like Marvel and DC, each series is an auteur experience. I'm not crazy about their "Umbrella Academy"; I admire its style, but both art and narrative are too frenzied and self conscious for me. And now a live-action version of a comic I would have thought too artificial and zany even for Adult Swim animation turns out to be engaging, exciting, film drama.

It's still beyond zany in conception and narrative: a band of youthful superbeings trained by a sadistic scientist with a chimpanzee Igor to prevent (I can barely keep my eyes open here) a world-engulfing apocalypse devised by time-traveling bureaucrat hit-men. Stop! Wait! Despite this mulch of clichés, a remarkable cast and gorgeous production values bring the thing to life. A lot of reviews of this first 10-episode season say the pace is slack; but the same critics end up giving the show 9 and 10 stars. The leisured pace is what allow the ensemble to meld and charm us.

There will be no spoilers here: only an appeal to watch the first episode and discover that Ellen Page is one of the finest actresses alive, even playing an emotionally repressed mouse of a violin player. Her special effects come from inside her. When the blue-screen gang go to work on her, you want to scream "stop already! She's flying without your help!"

. . . An American filmmaker can come forward with a totally personal film, in style and content. Sundance has its unwritten rules, but Netflix has the power to green-light a film that is a total one-off, an auteur film in the original sense of a much-abused term. Gilroy's light-touch horror-comedy is as cerebral as Godard and as grind-house as Russ Meyer: it's what it is, and like nothing else, a film-of-the-moment with no thought for posterity. A film that lets performers like Renée Russo and Jake Gyllenhaal out of their casting boxesand into the radical freedom of making a character where box-office promise is irrelevant.. I can't imagine wanting to see it twice. So I felt about films of Olivier Assayas and Spike Lee and Richard Linklater on first viewing. Now I see them as the Godard or Truffaut programmers that future critics will praise, while dismissing the conventional reviewers who didn't "get it". Come back to me in 2039 and let me know where Gilroy stands in the Pantheon. I'm willing to wait if you are.

Originally titled "When There's Prosecco, There's Hope", this is a happy, unpretentious murder-mystery comedy, set in a landscape so beautiful that you'll want to fly there and settle down for life. The actors look and talk like real people, but with the bright polish only years in front of the camera can provide. The story-telling is easy-going yet brilliantly plotted. If, when it's over, you don't crave a glass or two of Italian bubbly yourself, there's no life in you

It makes it seem that all one has to do to achieve greatness is understand the words, feel them deeply, and speak them clearly. Which, on the evidence of most productions, hardly anyone appears to be able to do. I don't pretend to understand the paradox.

From the first shot of the movie there's a sense that the eye behind the camera knows just where it's going. And the goal achieved is a grander and more distant one than anyone could imagine at the outset

. In long laconic takes a world emerges, in narrative time little happens, yet for the viewer the film is a series of small shocks of reversed expectations and sudden new perspectives. The cast, all unknown to me, now seem like old acquaintances.