2012 Oscar Guide (Part II)

Following yesterday's entry, here's my second offering with my concise opinion and rating of some of the films nominated in the main categories at this year's Academy Awards. Final predictions will be published here tomorrow.

The Tree of Life (***1/2). D: Terrence Malick. Cast: Hunter McCracken, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Fiona Shaw, Jessica Fuselier
Reflection about the origin of life and its meaning is overlong and demanding, but uniquely honest and affecting. Childhood has never been depicted with such sincerity on screen. McCracken is a revelation as the rebelious child and Pitt has never been better as the righteous father. Sean Penn and a couple of dinosaurs appear in equally unnecessary cameos. The cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki is breathtaking.

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2012 Oscar Guide (Part I)

So, in case you haven't heard, it's Oscar weekend and, in case you didn't know, it's gonna be The Artist. Oops, too late for the spoiler alert, sorry. Now seriously, I'll be offering up my traditional Oscar Predictions later in the weekend, but as I've been already tweeting around, the Oscar race this year is so dull and predictable that the challenge is actually going to be not to get them right.

That's why I have decided to spice things up a little and include an Oscar Guide of sorts: a compilation of mini-reviews, in the style of Leonard Maltin, of some of the films nominated in the major categories. If you happen not to know who Leonard Maltin is, I can tell you that he's the gentleman I've been sharing my bed with for the better part of the last two decades, much to the dismay of my life companion. So if next year you buy the 2013 issue of his legendary movie guide, a permanent feature on my bedside table, and there are matching reviews, I'll have solid grounds to assume that he reads my blog. First round of reviews, after the cut.

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Review: 'Take Shelter', a film by Jeff Nichols (****)

There is a key scene somewhere in the middle of Take Shelter, Jeff Nichol's impressive sophomore film, in which the premonitory dreams and apocalyptic visions which plague Curtis, the character played otherwise with arresting constraint by Michael Shannon, materialize in a full-fledged explosion. The paroxysm of the scene is all the more powerful because of the humble cosiness of the rural community dinner in which it takes place. When the storm of this truly disturbing sequence is over, there is no chance left for any calm. The director abruptly cuts to a close-up of Jessica Chastain's face, a shot which justifies on its own the award attention that this wonderful young actress has been gathering for the trillion films she was in last year. Her expression is revelatory of what words could never convey: the horrific realization of what really is going on there.

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Review: 'The Iron Lady', a film by Phyllida Lloyd (*1/2)

It is indicative of the The Iron Lady's own weaknesses and of the self-consciousness with which the film's creators approach its subject-matter that director Phyllida Lloyd and leading lady Meryl Streep have been announcing to all and sundry that their film is not a biopic of Margaret Thatcher. The statement is in itself highly questionable, for a film that revisits the life of a public person from their youth to old age must necessarily be a biopic, just as a film where the characters momentarily abandon the storyline to sing songs is a musical or an account of a young man's day on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944 is a war drama.

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Review: Voice Over, a short film by Martín Rosete

It is hard to predict at the beginning of Voice Over that the narrative of this formally exciting 10-minute film will take us from an unknown planet where an astronaut has crash landed his ship to a peacefully idyllic scene of first love with a French Eurovision Song Contest entry as background music, with intermediate stops in a WWI battle field and an undefined subaquatic landscape. Or maybe not, since the man at the helm of this project is the filmmaker that, for his award-winning 2002 film debut Revolución, chose to adapt a text by Sławomir Mrożek, the Polish author famous for the use of distortion, historical references and non-realistic elements in his work.

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