Finalist: The New York Times, by Manohla Dargis
For film criticism that rises from a sweeping breadth of knowledge – social, cultural, cinematic – while always keeping the viewer front and center.
Nominated Work
May 30, 2014
By Manohla Dargis
Angelina Jolie makes a fabulous monster. As the title character in “Maleficent” — a divertingly different rethink of an awfully old story — she breezes through the movie, part superstar, part superfreak.
Her red mouth slashes across the screen while her clothes billow like storm clouds, her body framed by enormous shimmering wings and her head capped by a pair of majestic horns. The wings allow her to soar, but the horns mainly give her character a distinctly Freudian kink, some phallic enhancement to go with the fairy tale enchantment. And, my, what big horns they are.
She wears them like a crown in this live-action postscript to the visually stunning 1959 Disney animated musical “Sleeping Beauty.” This time, the focus isn’t on the beautiful, blond Aurora, who falls into a deep, bewitched sleep after pricking her finger on a spindle, but rather on the sinister scene stealer who cursed her in a fit of pique and a puff of acid-green smoke. As it turns out, Maleficent (it rhymes with magnificent) had her reasons and a back story to go with them. Soothingly introduced in voice-over by Janet McTeer, Maleficent’s story opens when she was a happy young fairy (Isobelle Molloy and Ella Purnell) living in, and flying over, the moors, a lush, computer-generated wonderland populated by cute uglies and delicately mossy, twiggy giants.
Trouble enters in the form of a human boy, Stefan, a farmhand who’s caught pilfering a stone, a seemingly small act that reverberates as loudly as Klaxon horns. Maleficent forgives him; a friendship is born; time rushes by — it’s obvious that the filmmakers can’t wait to bring in Ms. Jolie — and the friendship evolves into a puppyish romance, sealed with a kiss. Stefan seems nice enough, if bland, and he’s played first by Michael Higgins and then, briefly, by Jackson Bews. Before long, though, Ms. Jolie has taken to the skies while, back in the human realm, Sharlto Copley has brought the adult Stefan ploddingly, disappointingly down to earth. Casting is destiny in a lot of movies; one look at the twitchy, shifty-eyed adult Stefan, and it’s clear that Mr. Copley won’t be continuing the romance.
He doesn’t. Instead, he betrays Maleficent and, in one of the movie’s muddled sections, helps wage war against her land. Her wings literally clipped, Maleficent retreats into her dark place like a grounded Valkyrie, casting shadows over her world to go with her mood. Stefan assumes the throne and, years later, he and his forgettable queen have a child, Aurora.
At this point, the filmmakers pick up the “Sleeping Beauty” thread and begin weaving it into Maleficent’s story, so, again, there are a christening and a curse, and Aurora is squired away by a troika of pixies (a tolerably amusing Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville and Juno Temple), who raise her in a forest cottage. There, she grows up (and eventually into Elle Fanning) under the gaze of Maleficent, which is where this rethink gets going.
In broad strokes, “Maleficent” is Disney’s latest bid to recast a dusty story for a contemporary audience, one that has, over the years, complained with good reason about the company’s representations, particularly of female characters. For decades, Disney has responded with an array of plucky girls and women whose desires extend beyond romantic longing. Usually, they have adventures, and not just dreams, to go with their wasp waists and froufrou. Sometimes they save the day and their true love, which is better and more fun than waiting to be saved. Yet Disney heroines, whether princesses or not, have almost always ended up as reliably paired off as if they were boarding Noah’s ark. A notable exception is Queen Elsa in “Frozen,” a very different kind of heroine.
That Elsa remains single in “Frozen” has inspired some widely, wildly divergent readings of that movie, with some commentators claiming her as a L.G.B.T. representation, and others denouncing her for the same reason. It’s entirely possible that “Maleficent,” partly because it’s narratively weak and Ms. Jolie is a powerful screen presence, will inspire its share of warring interpretations (and dismissals). The movie, directed by Robert Stromberg from Linda Woolverton’s script, draws on Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” and Charles Perrault’s version of the tale. Despite this, the narrative linchpin isn’t Aurora: It’s Maleficent, who doesn’t fit the fairy tale template largely because of her relationships. Stefan angers her, but she so gets over him and soon shifts her attention elsewhere.
Mr. Stromberg, a production designer making his feature directing debut, does best when he scales down, as in the lovely shots of Maleficent walking next to a floating, unconscious Aurora, an image that telegraphs more about their relationship than any line of dialogue. The action scenes, by contrast, are visually uninteresting, borderline generic and unnecessary. There are also far too many long shots when the digital renderings (especially those with human figures) pull you out of the story instead of keeping you immersed. But there’s so much to look at in the movie — from the wittily designed creatures to the shocks of bilious green and purple — that the battles quickly fade. (The colors are, as is a galloping race to the rescue, among the many nods to the 1959 “Sleeping Beauty.”)
December 3, 2014
With ‘Selma,’ Ava DuVernay Seeks a Different Equality
By Manohla Dargis
On a swampy afternoon in late June, the director Ava DuVernay stood not far from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., that haunted place where, President Lyndon B. Johnson told the country, history and fate met. She was instructing a group of white extras on all the ugly things she wanted them to yell at the several hundred black extras snaking across the bridge, part of a sizable army of cast and crew that had been gathered together for “Selma,” her new movie about the campaign for black voter rights.
That day, Ms. DuVernay was restaging Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when the police violently attacked marchers trying to walk to Montgomery, where they would eventually hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call out to the world: “How long? Not long! Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” A centrifugal force, Ms. DuVernay rarely seemed to stop moving. As she called “Action!,” and people and horses began to run, smoke flooding the air, it was thrilling to witness a female director bring this agonizing American story to life and, in the process, stake her own claim on our cultural history.
Ms. DuVernay, 42, belongs to what she calls “a small sorority” of black female filmmakers, who are part of another modest American sisterhood: female directors of any color. And with “Selma,” she has done what few female directors get the opportunity to do, which is go large — with politics and history — with a decent budget and serious muscle. Paramount Pictures is releasing the movie on Dec. 25, and the producers include Oprah Winfrey, who has a small role in the movie as an activist, and Plan B, Brad Pitt’s company. Four years ago, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award as best director; Ms. DuVernay has a shot to become the second.
Like many, I had hoped Ms. Bigelow’s Oscar for “The Hurt Locker” would be transformative, and that soon female directors would be accepted as equal to men, and, crucially, hired as equals. But that hasn’t happened. In 2009, when “The Hurt Locker” was released, women made up 7 percent of the directors on the top 250 domestic grossing films, according to an annual report by the researcher Martha M. Lauzen. As of early December, by my count, only 19 women — 7.6 percent — were directors on the top 250 grossing features released this year. “Selma” may increase that percentage, as might another big-studio release, Angelina Jolie’s “Unbroken,” about the Olympic runner and war prisoner Louis Zamperini.
It will take more than these two filmmakers to disrupt the industry’s sexism, which has long shut women out from directing movies and, increasingly, shuts them out on screen, too. Notably, Ms. DuVernay and Ms. Jolie, having made movies about women, have now made the leap to bigger stakes with stories centered on men. I hope their movies burn up the box office, but I also hope they return to movies about women. We need those stories, and these days, female directors are often the only ones interested in them. Gender equality is an undeniable imperative. But it’s also essential to the future of the movies: This American art became great with stories about men and women, not just a superhero and some token chick.
Ms. DuVernay’s path to “Selma” is unusual, not only because she belongs to a small sorority, but also because she came to directing through publicity. After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles (she majored in English and African-American studies), she had a flirtation with broadcast journalism before landing a publicity job. At 27, she founded her own agency, working on movies by the likes of Steven Spielberg, which embedded her in every stage of the movie process, all the way to award shows. She was on the set of “Collateral” (2004) the moment that she realized what she wanted.
“I just remember standing there in the middle of the night in East L.A. and watching Michael Mann direct and thinking, ‘I have stories,’ ” she said. “That was the moment I thought: ‘Wow, I could do this. I would like to do that.’ ”
She narrated this origin story back home in Los Angeles in September, as we talked in her house, a midcentury perch overlooking Beachwood Canyon with a view of the Hollywood sign. Hours earlier, she had, in the fashion of 21st century cinema, delivered her cut of “Selma” through a high-speed file transfer. Now people whose opinions mattered — including the producers on the Paramount lot a few miles away and the famous one in Chicago (“Ms. Winfrey,” as Ms. DuVernay calls her) — were looking at “Selma” for the first time.
“Your foot is shaking,” I said. “Are you nervous?”
Ms. DuVernay radiates terrific self-confidence, but I assumed that she was anxious. “No,” she shot back.
With its $20 million production budget and the support of a major studio, “Selma” is far bigger than any of Ms. DuVernay’s previous movies. She made her last one, “Middle of Nowhere,” for $200,000. A small-scale, lapidary drama about a woman finding love, though mostly herself, it was beautifully shot by the cinematographer Bradford Young. (They reunited for “Selma.”) It was well received at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, but, like the rest of the entries that year, it was overshadowed by the juggernaut known as “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Ms. DuVernay became the first black woman to win the dramatic directing award at Sundance, and while that was gratifying, it didn’t translate into any immediate gains. “No one offered me anything,” she said matter-of-factly.
This is in stark contrast with what happened to Colin Trevorrow, whose first feature, “Safety Not Guaranteed,” was also at the 2012 festival. In what has become a familiar story of male success, he went on to direct the relaunch of a franchise behemoth, “Jurassic World.” Women rarely receive those kinds of big breaks. The director Mimi Leder (“Deep Impact”) and the writer Linda Woolverton (“Maleficent”) have made a lot of money for the industry, but they recently told me they, too, don’t get the calls that you might expect. That no one clamored to hire Ms. DuVernay is even less a surprise given the segregation of American cinema and an industry mind-set that deems that a movie with two black leads is no longer simply a movie but a black movie.
Ms. DuVernay started directing first in documentary, where budgets tend to be low, and you don’t necessarily need to ask anyone’s permission, two reasons so many women may gravitate to the field. She made her first feature, “This Is the Life” (2008), a documentary about a Los Angeles hip-hop scene, for $10,000: check to check as she put it. She subsequently took $50,000 that she had saved to buy a house and used it to make her first dramatic feature, “I Will Follow” (2010), an autobiographical tale about a niece mourning an aunt. Ms. DuVernay released the movie through a distribution company she founded (she’s a busy woman) and sank $100,000 of the profits into “Middle of Nowhere.”
Through it all she kept her day job, which is how she came to “Selma.” In January 2010, The Daily News in New York ran an item about the script, by Paul Webb, and a scene in which Dr. King flirts with a prostitute or, as The News put it, “MLK Flick has Tryst Issues.” (There’s no such scene in the final movie.) Ms. DuVernay was tapped as a liaison between King family members and the filmmakers. Nothing ever came of that, however, because the project fell apart when Lee Daniels, who was set to be the director, left after years of trying to make the screenplay work with the budget he had been given.
Ms. DuVernay said that the first director who considered “Selma” was Mr. Mann, who was followed by an intriguing list of directors that she ticked off with a practiced air: Stephen Frears, Paul Haggis, Spike Lee and finally Mr. Daniels. She said that with the exit of Mr. Daniels the producers “just gave up.” David Oyelowo (pronounced oh-YELL-ow-oh), who plays Dr. King, did not. Ms. DuVernay had cast him in “Middle of Nowhere,” and he believed that she could handle “Selma.” He made his case for her in a letter to Pathé, the company that originally financed the movie. (Paramount came onboard later.)
Mr. Oyelowo, speaking by phone, said: “If Tom Hooper is allowed to do ‘The King’s Speech,’ having not necessarily done films of a much bigger budget for Pathé, then why not? Why not take a punt on her?”
He said Ms. DuVernay had to do some rewriting of the script to work with a budget that was lower than she ended up with. What had been a liability for her — directing with tiny sums of money — became an unexpected asset and, unlike all the male directors, she was able to make the script and budget work together. At some point, Mr. Oyelowo said, everyone realized that she was the one: “If we can’t make it work with her, this film is never going to work. It’s just never going to happen.”
“Selma” is certainly modest when compared to mega-blockbusters, where $200 million production budgets are no longer uncommon. (Throw in more for marketing and distribution.) For independents, though, and especially for women, it’s significant. (The production budget often cited for “The Hurt Locker” is about $15 million.) The day I visited the “Selma” set, I was struck by how Ms. DuVernay had made the leap from low-budget filmmaking with a handful of people to commanding hundreds. “I just need some white racists on this side!” she yelled at one point. She later complained that the day had been chaotic, but she looked fully in command, her long hair tucked under a scarf, whether riding shotgun on a cart with Mr. Young or on the ground. Later, when lunch was called, Ms. DuVernay greeted the extras who poured off the bridge, calling out thanks and giving and receiving hugs. Among the marchers were men and women who had been there when the tear gas and blood were real. The march, she said, is “a sensitive subject matter to that community,” and she was navigating through a weighty legacy.
At the same time, I was watching a very smart filmmaker command a veritable army partly with hugs. Movie sets can be very unfriendly spaces for women, as she knows. Before she started shooting, she recalled, she sat down with “every single person” on the crew and said, “I’m inviting you to work with me, so this is going to run in the way that I want it to run.”
Even before “Selma,” Ms. DuVernay had beaten the terrible odds that women face by making her own movies on her own terms. It has brought her new attention, but, in deciding what’s next, she needs to choose carefully. Women don’t always get second chances if they stumble, and they don’t have a long, rich history of female filmmakers to learn from. “Do I play that game and try to figure out what the next move is?” Ms. DuVernay wondered. “Or can I be like these guys that just do whatever the interesting stuff is?”
One of those guys is Cary Fukunaga, who went from directing indies like “Sin Nombre” to the HBO show “True Detective.” “The way that these men move,” Ms. DuVernay said admiringly. “The more proven way is to just stay a good girl,” she added “but the artist in me wants to move like Fukunaga’s moving.”
I checked in with Ms. DuVernay again in November after she had locked “Selma.” Screenings had gone well, and Oscar talk was building. She was tired and after two long years on the movie, suddenly unemployed. She won’t be for long. No matter what happens, she believes she can always raise enough money to shoot a new movie.
And while she wants to continue making movies about women, “Selma” has opened her up to new ideas about how she too can move. Her earlier narrative features, she said, were “very interior, intimate stories,” but, “Selma,” with its set pieces and action scenes, has freed her to think about telling larger stories about women.
“It’s not really all about money,” she said, parsing the challenges women directors face. “Some of it is about allowing our imaginations — and giving ourselves permission — to go outside.”
July 11, 2014
By Manohla Dargis
The first shot in “Boyhood,” Richard Linklater’s tender, profound film, is of a cloudy sky. The second is of a boy staring up at that sky, one arm bent under his head, the other flung out straight on the ground. He’s a pretty child with calm eyes, a snub nose and a full mouth. It’s a face that you get to know and love because, even as this child is watching the world, you’re watching him grow. From scene to scene, you see the curve of his jaw change, notice his thickening brows and witness his slender arms opening to embrace the world and its clear and darkening skies.
Filmed over 12 consecutive years, “Boyhood” centers on Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who’s 6 when the story opens and 18 when it ends. In between, he goes to school; argues with his sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter); and watches his mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), struggle with work and men while paying the bills, moving from home to home and earning several degrees. Every so often, her ex-husband, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), roars into the children’s lives, initially in a 1968 GTO. It isn’t a dad car (although it does belong to one: Mr. Linklater). It is, rather, the same model of masculine cool that rumbles through “Two-Lane Blacktop,” one of Mr. Linklater’s favorite movies, and which he’s slipped into films like “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused.”
The GTO is a minor authorial marker, and probably helped keep costs down in this relatively inexpensive production. (The movie was heroically bankrolled from the start by its distributor, Jonathan Sehring of IFC Films.) More practically, it works as an expressive emblem to go along with Mason Sr.’s absences, his careless parenting, on-and-off facial hair and earnest bohemian rhapsodies. Unforgiving observers may write Mason Sr. off as a deadbeat, but, like Olivia, who sometimes lobs expletives at her unfazed children, he’s deeply loving. These aren’t movie parents with formulaic arcs and storybook solutions, but characters whose honest, raw hurt and moments of casual grace carry the shock of the real. These are people you know, maybe people like you.
The realism is jolting, and so brilliantly realized and understated that it would be easy to overlook. In “Boyhood,” Mr. Linklater’s inspired idea of showing the very thing that most movies either ignore or awkwardly elide — the passage of time — is its impressive, headline-making conceit. Starting in 2002, he gathered his four lead actors each year for a three- to four-day shoot, working on the script as they went along. (The consummate anti-slacker, Mr. Linklater also shot during that period a clutch of shorts and features, including “Before Sunset,” the second in a trilogy of films with Mr. Hawke; a fictional adaptation of “Fast Food Nation”; and a weirdly touching comedy about a murderer, “Bernie.”)
What emerged from those dozen years is a series of meticulously textured and structured scenes set to the rhythm of life. The structure is crucial. Mr. Linklater has long experimented with nontraditional narratives, from the baton-relay form of “Slacker,” in which he leaves one character to follow the next, to the peripatetic ramblings of his “Before” trilogy. His films are sometimes mischaracterized as having no plot, perhaps because they may seem so, when compared with aggressively incident-jammed mainstream movies. One of the fascinating things about “Boyhood” is that a lot happens — there are parties and fights, laughter and tears — but all these events take place in a distinctly quotidian register and without the usual filmmaking prodding and cues.
Instead, the movie ebbs and flows from year to year, interspersed with temporal signposts like a Britney Spears song or a Nintendo Wii. One minute, Mason is looking quizzically at Olivia while she chats with a professor, Bill (Marco Perella); the next, he’s with his sister and Bill’s children, Mindy (Jamie Howard) and Randy (Andrew Villarreal), in the backyard the two families now share as one. Some of the transitions are imperceptible, especially when Mason is younger, and all are meaningful. Midway through, when he strips off his shirt to go swimming with his father and then asks about girls, you see the last traces of baby fat and true childhood. By the next section, Mason has shot up and slimmed down, and is now talking to girls, not just about them.
For a filmmaker known for the loquaciousness of his characters, Mr. Linklater has an almost un-American rejection of overexplanation. When you first meet Mason at 6, gazing at the sky while lying on a patch of grass, he looks a touch beatific. He also looks like a little kid staring into space. Is he happy, sad or bored? And when he gazes at a dead bird, what does he think?; how does he feel? Mr. Linklater doesn’t say. Instead, he fills the frame with a close-up of Mason’s face, letting the silence and weight of death linger. Mr. Linklater’s characters can talk a blue streak, but rarely in his work, and never in “Boyhood,” do you hear the hum of his narrative design under their words.
The film’s visual style is precise, unassuming to the point of seeming invisibility and in the service of the characters, with compositions that remain unfussy and uncluttered, even when the rooms are busy. When Mr. Linklater films a landscape, your eye locks not on the camerawork but on the beauty of these spaces and the people in them — the enveloping greenness of the neighborhood in which Mason first rides a bike, for instance, and the tranquillity of the watering hole that, years later, he swims in with his dad. Mr. Linklater is especially fond of showing two people walking and talking, and you learn as much about the characters’ relationships from how they inhabit space — his two-shots speak volumes — as from what they say. He’s a poet-geometrician of intimacy.
It’s almost surprising that no one seems to have made a movie like “Boyhood” before. Its closest counterpart is probably the “7 Up” series, Michael Apted’s multipart documentary project that since 1964 has dropped in every seven years on the same, more or less, British women and men, beginning when they were 7. Watching seemingly carefree children thrive and fail as they age — or, more prosaically, turn into dreary, respectable citizens — can be like a knife in your heart. It can also be somewhat eerie, simply because the series compresses decades of a human life into scenes that are, by turns, seamless and jagged — an eeriness that “Boyhood” shares as 12 years of Mason’s life slips by in 165 startlingly fast minutes. We’re here today, gone tomorrow.
Radical in its conceit, familiar in its everyday details, “Boyhood” exists at the juncture of classical cinema and the modern art film without being slavishly indebted to either tradition. It’s a model of cinematic realism, and its pleasures are obvious yet mysterious. Even after seeing the film three times, I haven’t fully figured out why it has maintained such a hold on me, and why I’m eager to see it again. There are many reasons to love movies, from the stories they tell, to the beautiful characters who live and die for us. And yet the story in “Boyhood” is blissfully simple: A child grows up. This, along with the modesty of its physical production — its humble rooms, quiet moments, ordinary lives — can obscure Mr. Linklater’s ambitions and the greatness of his achievement.
It’s no surprise that watching actors naturally age on camera without latex and digital effects makes for mesmerizing viewing. And at first it may be hard to notice much more than the creases etching Mr. Hawke’s face, the sexy swells of Ms. Arquette’s belly and Mr. Coltrane’s growth spurts. You may see your own face in those faces, your children’s, too. This kind of identification is familiar, as is the idea that movies preserve time. André Bazin wrote that art emerged from our desire to counter the passage of time and the inevitable decay it brings. But in “Boyhood,” Mr. Linklater’s masterpiece, he both captures moments in time and relinquishes them as he moves from year to year. He isn’t fighting time but embracing it in all its glorious and agonizingly fleeting beauty.
“Boyhood” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film contains some familiar expletives and scenes of domestic violence.
Boyhood
Opens on Friday
Written and directed by Richard Linklater; directors of photography, Lee Daniel and Shane Kelly; edited by Sandra Adair; production design by Rodney Becker; costumes by Kari Perkins; produced by Mr. Linklater, Cathleen Sutherland, Jonathan Sehring and John Sloss; released by IFC Films. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.
WITH: Patricia Arquette (Mom), Ellar Coltrane (Mason), Lorelei Linklater (Samantha), Ethan Hawke (Dad), Marco Perella (Prof. Bill Welbrock), Jamie Howard (Mindy) and Andrew Villarreal (Randy).
February 23, 2014
By Manohla Dargis
It was at the 2008 Venice Film Festival that Jennifer Lawrence — future Oscar winner, squirrel skinner, American warrior — signaled that she was no ordinary starlet. She wasn’t yet famous then, just a paparazzi afterthought to Charlize Theron, her co-star in “The Burning Plain,” one of those agonizingly dopey movies that play at major festivals because of their red-carpet power. During a pseudo-event for the movie, Ms. Theron spoke about the limited number of older actresses working in the industry and showered praise on another co-star, Kim Basinger, who wasn’t there. Ms. Lawrence apparently silenced the room by joking that Ms. Basinger had died. The girl can’t help it!
What Ms. Lawrence then said was funnier and so blunt that only a journalist for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph appears to have repeated it. “Working with Kim was one of the most amazing moments of my life,” Ms. Lawrence said. “She’s so focused and smart and nice — everything you don’t expect when you hear you’re going to be working with Kim Basinger.” Was that a ditzy gaffe or a sly, funny dig of the kind that once might have come out of Judy Holliday? Or was Jennifer Lawrence just being Jennifer Lawrence, the best actress winner who tripped on her way to grab her Oscar for David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” and then — in what was the perfect capper to the inanity of the awards season — flipped the bird at someone in the press room?
“Silver Linings Playbook” is the movie that turned me around on Ms. Lawrence, 23, transforming me from a skeptic into an appreciative admirer. Did she change, or did I? In the 1940 screwball comedy “The Philadelphia Story” Katharine Hepburn’s character says that “the time to make up your mind about people — is never.” That’s good advice, too, for film critics, whose trade calls on them to make judgments routinely after a single encounter with the objects of their inquiry. One viewing of her star turn as an Ozarks scrapper in “Winter’s Bone,” the movie that prompted many to break out the word breakthrough at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, hadn’t convinced me, and neither did her turn as the blue bombshell Mystique in the 2011 action film “X-Men: First Class.”
As Tiffany, the randy widow turned dancing stalker in “Silver Linings,” Ms. Lawrence inhabited a deceptively tricky role with such transparency that it felt as if she had collapsed the space between her and the character. Tiffany doesn’t make much story sense — she cajoles Bradley Cooper’s character into partnering with her for a dance contest, though neither can really dance — but Mr. Russell’s film is irresistible, and Ms. Lawrence’s performance so likable, uninflected and emotionally believable that it makes the narrative contrivances irrelevant. Like all of Ms. Lawrence’s signature characters, she can’t be denied, whether chasing down Mr. Cooper’s wreck in “Silver Linings” or landing a kiss on Amy Adams that feels like a sucker punch in Mr. Russell’s latest, “American Hustle.”
In that film, Ms. Lawrence plays Rosalyn, the neglected wife of a con man (Christian Bale) who’s fallen for Ms. Adams’s character. Ms. Lawrence doesn’t have all that much screen time, but she’s a dominating, palpably physical presence, all thrusting bosom, scissoring hips, running mouth and towering, exploding hair. (She’s been nominated for best supporting actress.) It’s a delectable, juicy, surprising performance: You never know what Rosalyn wants, perhaps because Mr. Russell may not either. But that makes the character a woozy, destabilizing delight in a film that makes a virtue out of chaos. And because Mr. Russell likes working with women as much as men, Rosalyn isn’t a prop or fetishized spectacle but the equal of her male counterpart (Mr. Cooper).
When Rosalyn wobbles in heels, do we see her or Ms. Lawrence, and does it matter? In that wobble, you see a storm coming, as well as flickering reminders of Jean Harlow in “Dinner at Eight” and Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like It Hot.” But you also see one of those exciting, precarious representations of life that the movies offer us. Yet while all actors act, stars give more than performances: They deliver identifiable, commodifiable personalities that often blur the lines between their on-screen and off-screen worlds and the hard work that goes into star creation. Cary Grant personified cinematic elegance, but he also trained as an acrobat, which helps explain his physical grace even when he took a tumble. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” he once famously said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.”
From Ms. Lawrence’s interviews, her off-screen mugging, photo bombing and Marty Feldman-caliber eye popping, she doesn’t appear especially interested in playing the star; being human seems enough for now. That isn’t as easy as it sounds given how profoundly difficult it’s become for stars to have anything like a private life — to walk to a yoga class or pass out drunk in a friend’s car — without becoming fodder for tabloids and gossip sites. Some stars handle the lack of privacy disastrously, feeding the beast even as it eats them, while others turn their lives into performances that they deliver one item at a time, as Angelina Jolie brilliantly does. Many just smile and repeat the same canned answers about how thrilling it was to work with this other famous person.
The only sister of two older brothers, Ms. Lawrence may come across like a natural, but her talent has been honed by almost a decade of experience as a working actor. At 14, while visiting New York, she was tapped by a modeling scout. She showed up on television in shows like “Cold Case” (as the daughter of a murdered woman) and “Medium” (in one episode, she played half of a daughter-mother double homicide) and emerged unscathed from a bad sitcom, “The Bill Engvall Show.” In 2008, she added three movies to her résumé, including “The Burning Plain” and another forgettable title, “Garden Party.” More important, there was the leading role in an interesting mess, “The Poker House,” a brutal, autobiographically inspired film from the actress turned director Lori Petty about growing up in a home in which her mother turned tricks.
In playing the oldest of three daughters of a drug-and-drink-wasted prostitute, Ms. Lawrence slipped into a part that felt like a template for her roles in “Winter’s Bone” and “The Hunger Games”: the fresh-faced, life-hardened survivalist forced to be the parent for her younger siblings and their zonked-out mother. In “The Poker House,” she makes out with her mother’s pimp and waves around a gun, is raped and almost immediately plays in a championship basketball game. Although she looks as young as her 14-year-old character, Ms. Lawrence also projects the kind of native toughness in the face of large and small threats that makes the film’s agonies endurable. You have to wonder if this resiliency is what Jodie Foster saw when she cast Ms. Lawrence in “The Beaver.”
By the time “The Beaver” was released, in May 2011, Ms. Lawrence had already been nominated for best actress for “Winter’s Bone” (losing to Natalie Portman) and cast as Katniss Everdeen in “The Hunger Games.” She was 21 when it was released, which seemed too old for a food-deprived 16-year-old described in the book as looking like 14. That Ms. Lawrence’s curves might be part of the marketing calculus to attract male viewers to a female-driven film — the studio was chasing what the industry calls four quadrants, or male, female, under and over 25 — didn’t cross my mind until later. I still think that she was miscast, but after repeat viewings and a landmark sequel, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else leading this revolution.
In January, “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” broke a couple of records, first by overtaking “Iron Man 3” to become the highest domestic grosser of 2013. That same month, the writer and incisive industry observer Mark Harris noticed that “Catching Fire” had reached an even more startling benchmark: It was the first movie with a lone female lead to top an annual box-office chart since “The Exorcist” 40 years earlier. “Catching Fire” — and, by extension, the film series— had, by ending a four-decade run of male-driven stories and romances, become a cultural touchstone that makes aesthetic objections beside the point. The franchise won’t force the necessary changes at the big studios, but its success should make it harder for industry suits and their media apologists to dismiss movies about women.
Even so, entertainment media types continue, with smiles and rank condescension, to label Ms. Lawrence “awkwardly charming” — a headline for a recent “Today” show online item said she made the Golden Globes “more awesome, in her great goofy way” — which suggests how anomalous she registers, how confusing and unclassifiable she is amid the bland and the blond. Instructively, her fame isn’t amplified or obscured by fashion magazines or the red carpet, where so many actresses keep up the appearance of stardom even as they’re denied sizable, serious major studio roles. She’s done her time posing and preening, playing the girlie girl, the paper doll and wide-eyed ingénue, but she’s also muscled onto the big screen alongside multimillion-dollar men like Robert Downey Jr. The odds still are not in her favor, but I’m betting on her to win.
March 21, 2014
By Manohla Dargis
Women warriors are on the rise again in American movies, and so, too, are hopes that they’ll be able to strike where it counts: in the industry’s executive suites.
Some of this faith can be traced, irrationally or exuberantly, to “The Hunger Games.”
Its second installment, “Catching Fire,” wasn’t only the highest grossing movie of 2013, it also pulled in a lot of guys, and not just, you know, women, that 52 percent of North American moviegoers who are deemed a limited demographic, a niche and a seemingly unsolvable problem. That no one would ever frame male-driven franchises like “Iron Man,” “Spider-Man” and “The Dark Knight” as niche attractions helps explain that problem.
So, yea for “Divergent,” a dumb movie that I hope makes major bank if only as a reminder of the obvious: Women can drive big and little movies, including the pricey franchises that fire up the box office and the culture.
To do so, though, they’re going to need directors who can handle the demands of an industrial production like this and a script that obscures rather than emphasizes the weakness of the source material. A good action choreographer will be crucial, as will decent hair and makeup.
That the length of Shailene Woodley’s eyelashes changes throughout “Divergent” may have been amusingly distracting for a while (maybe they’re mood lashes, a friend quipped), but such shoddiness also underscores the contempt that movie companies have for the medium and the audience.
Veronica Roth, who wrote the book “Divergent” and its two hot-selling follow-ups, tends to avoid mentioning “The Hunger Games,” but the similarities between these young-adult juggernauts are conspicuous in the extreme. “The Hunger Games” is a dystopian tale set in a postwar North America divided into 13 districts; “Divergent” is a dystopian tale set in postwar Chicago divided into five factions. Each series pivots on a gutsy teenage heroine who fights to the death like a classic male hero. Each year, the young characters in the books undergo a weird ritual: In “The Hunger Games,” wee ones are sent into mortal combat; the initiation ritual in “Divergent,” much like the book itself, is rather more anticlimactic, because teenagers just choose which faction to grow old in.
There is a crucial difference: While Katniss Everdeen doesn’t make much room for romance in “The Hunger Games” (she has a revolution to lead), Tris Prior spends a whole lot of time wondering why her instructor pays attention to her. He’s a guy, as if you didn’t know, because while “Divergent” celebrates individuality and breaking out of the little boxes that its authoritarian leaders (i.e., adults) insist on putting teenagers in, the story sticks to the familiar gendered template. Girl warrior meets boy warrior and, in between punches, kicks and bullets, they hold hands. One of the few real surprises in the “Divergent” novel is that it’s nearly as chaste as the “Twilight” series, although Ms. Woodley and her romantic foil, Four (Theo James), do open wide during several kisses.
They make a fine duo. They’re easy on the eyes, for one, and Ms. Woodley has a gift for conveying a sense of genuine, deep-tissue sincerity, while Mr. James, whose slashing cheekbones look as if they could do some serious damage, is good at keeping a straight face. (He’s had practice: Until now, he was best known for croaking in Lady Mary’s bed in “Downton Abbey.”) The characters trade many moony looks as well as spit, but their cute, farcically overdetermined match — he thrusts with penetrating stares, while she parries by retreating and looking at her feet or a wall — grows wearisome when it becomes clear that there’s not much else going on. Lots of things happen, of course, as per the dystopian rule book, but for all the jumping and scaling of heights, the movie remains grounded.
The story, adapted by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor, opens with Tris living with her family in Abnegation, a faction whose inhabitants have embraced selflessness to the point of pride and who wear drab, flowing clothes that suggest that Eileen Fisher managed to survive Armageddon. Tris, however, yearns to run wild with Dauntless, a faction that puts a premium on courage, fearlessness, piercings, tattoos and hair gel. Each faction — the others are Amity, Candor and Erudite — lives according to restricted values in order to keep the peace and considers an outlier like Tris, called Divergent, as a threat. It doesn’t make any sense, but Ms. Roth’s prose style is good enough and Tris appealing enough that, at least in the book, it’s easy to breeze past the plot holes.
It’s harder to ignore those flaws in the movie, partly because the director, Neil Burger (“Limitless”), gives you little to hang onto — beauty, thrills, a visual style. The script, or what’s left of it, doesn’t help, because someone (it’s impossible to know who merits most of the blame in a big enterprise like this) has made the familiar blunder of thinking that the most important thing in adapting a book to the screen is the stuff that happens rather than to whom it happens. That the Dauntless inhabitants like to jump on and off moving trains or clamber up buildings like monkeys isn’t interesting or novel. What matters is how thrillingly free and alive Tris feels when she hurtles across an abyss or zip-lines over the ruined city. “Fear doesn’t shut you down,” Four tells Tris, “it wakes you up.”
You have to take his word for it. It’s hard not to root for Ms. Woodley, who has been coming on strong in recent indie titles like “The Descendants” and “The Spectacular Now,” but she seems palpably uncomfortable here. There’s a tentative, awkward quality to her physical performance that at times registers as a lack of confidence and that, as the story progresses, is badly at odds with her character’s intensifying ferocity. That hardly seems like Ms. Woodley’s fault, given that she’s ill-served by the production on so many levels, from the fight choreography to the dialogue and those eyelashes. But it’s finally galling because women will never break out of the representational ghetto they’ve been relegated to if you watch a movie like this one and think that the heroine, metaphorically and otherwise, throws like a girl.
“Divergent” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The old dystopian woes and violence.
Divergent
Opens on Friday.
Directed by Neil Burger; written by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor, based on the book by Veronica Roth; director of photography, Alwin Küchler; edited by Richard Francis-Bruce and Nancy Richardson; music by Junkie XL; production design by Andy Nicholson; costumes by Carlo Poggioli; produced by Douglas Wick, Lucy Fisher and Pouya Shahbazian; released by Summit Entertainment. Running time: 2 hours 23 minutes.
WITH: Shailene Woodley (Tris), Theo James (Four), Ashley Judd (Natalie), Jai Courtney (Eric), Ray Stevenson (Marcus), Zoë Kravitz (Christina), Miles Teller (Peter), Tony Goldwyn (Andrew), Ansel Elgort (Caleb), Maggie Q (Tori), Mekhi Phifer (Max) and Kate Winslet (Jeanine).
April 18, 2014
By Manohla Dargis
Johnny Depp, who’s built a brilliant career despite many of his lamentable film choices, may not be the first actor you think of to play a genius — much less humanity’s destroyer or savior. But he’s weirdly perfect in “Transcendence,” an inelegant, no doubt implausible (maybe not) science-fiction film about a futurist whose consciousness is uploaded onto the Internet. There, he (or a mysterious vestige of his being) expands like the universe, growing larger and mutating into a being who is godlike and yet far from divine, sort of like a star at the apex of his popularity.
Directed by Wally Pfister, a cinematographer making his feature directing debut, “Transcendence” is a dark, lurchingly entertaining pastiche of age-old worries, future-shock jolts, hot-button topics and old-fashioned genre thrills. It was written by Jack Paglen, who, while researching, probably thumbed through Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” along with some Isaac Asimov and William Gibson. The scientist here is Will Caster (Mr. Depp), whose work in artificial intelligence has landed him on the cover of Wired magazine. (Even in a brave new world, old media remains useful shorthand.) With his wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), a computer scientist, Will has created PINN, one of those supermachines with sleek surfaces, blinking lights and pulsating menace.
The twist in “Transcendence” is that the scientist becomes the monster of his own creation or so it seems. Shortly after the film opens, Will is shot by an extremist during a series of coordinated attacks on high-tech targets. He survives the initial assault only to succumb to the radiation that laced the bullet.
As he lies dying, Evelyn, in one of those eureka moments that implies her brain is as infinite as her husband’s, initially uploads Will’s consciousness into PINN, a clever bit of business she manages with their friend Max Waters (a solid Paul Bettany), a neurobiologist. One minute Will looks like a tortured lab monkey; the next, he’s the ghost in everybody’s machine. Well, it sounds plausible or at least Mr. Pfister moves fast enough that you don’t have time to puzzle over niceties like logic.
Like some other notable machine-based intelligences — including the ship’s computer in the original “Star Trek,” CORA in the television series “Battlestar Galactica” and Samantha in Spike Jonze’s recent film “Her” — PINN has a female voice. It may be that the enduringly creepy legacy of HAL 9000, the mutinous computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” has made it tougher for male voices to fill in these disembodied characters. Whatever the case, while artificial intelligences with any kind of human voice seem at once familiar and uncanny, further blurring the line between makers and their machines, those with female voices also suggest another creation story, that of Adam (the origin) and Eve (the product). “Transcendence” plays with this idea, and it’s not for nothing that its heroine is named Evelyn.
Once Will’s consciousness is uploaded, his voice supplants PINN’s. In its initial poetic fragmentation, the voice emanating from Evelyn’s reconfigured supercomputer sounds amusingly like Marlon Brando’s tape-recorded ramblings as Colonel Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now.” (Mr. Depp and Brando were friends.) After some throat clearing, though, Will starts to sound like himself and the movie gets its crazy on.
His image pops up on screen, like some holographic specter, a kind of rebirth that thrills Evelyn and freaks out most everyone else, including, naturally enough, the extremists. Implausibly led by a scowling half-pint, Bree (Kate Mara), they try to stop Will and Evelyn, in a chase that also pulls in other scientists and government agents played by the likes of Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy.
Mr. Pfister, shooting on film and working with the cinematographer Jess Hall, gives “Transcendence” the dark, gleaming surfaces that gloss up a lot of contemporary thrillers and which can’t help evoking Christopher Nolan’s work. Mr. Pfister has been the director of photography on most of Mr. Nolan’s films, including the “Dark Knight” trilogy, and Mr. Nolan has given “Transcendence” his blessing by signing on as an executive producer. So it’s no surprise that the depthless blacks and glowing whites in “Transcendence” and Mr. Pfister’s use of negative space suggest Mr. Nolan’s influence, notably in the high-tech complex where Evelyn and Will set up a compound. When Evelyn walks down one of its luminous white halls, she looks as if she’s headed right for one of Bruce Wayne’s lairs.
These visual echoes don’t hurt “Transcendence,” and they soon recede amid the escalating narrative noise. Mr. Pfister handles the predictable third-act action booms adequately — it must be contractual that every director who makes a thriller these days must blow his sets to smithereens — but he’s better when the story scales down.
When Evelyn appears in that white hallway, Mr. Pfister is showing off the production design, but he’s also bringing you close to a woman who, as Will’s power expands, is becoming progressively more isolated. One of those actresses who always seem smart even in dumb roles, Ms. Hall is very sympathetic as a woman in love and then in fear who, scene by scene and with palpable tenderness, takes over the film as Will gobbles up the world.
To an extent, “Transcendence” can be filed alongside other movies about fanaticism that have emerged since Sept. 11. Yet, for all its topical gloss and technobabble, it also draws from older, familiar preoccupations about the nature of being, which, along with Mr. Pfister’s eye and largely smooth handling of his actors, accounts for its modest pleasures.
However predictable and ridiculous, the film raises the question of what — as the machines rise — makes us human and why, which certainly gives you more to chew on at the multiplex than is customary these days. In “Frankenstein,” the monster tells his creator, “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.” This is the warning that pulses through many dystopian fictions and which here finds another beat.
“Transcendence” is rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned.) Dystopian violence.
Transcendence
Opens on Friday.
Directed by Wally Pfister; written by Jack Paglen; director of photography, Jess Hall; edited by David Rosenbloom; music by Mychael Danna; production design by Chris Seagers; costumes by George L. Little; produced by Andrew A. Kosove, Broderick Johnson, Kate Cohen, Marisa Polvino, Annie Marter, David Valdes and Aaron Ryder; released by Warner Bros. Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes.
WITH: Johnny Depp (Will Caster), Rebecca Hall (Evelyn Caster), Paul Bettany (Max Waters), Cillian Murphy (Agent Buchanan), Kate Mara (Bree), Clifton Collins, Jr. (Martin) and Morgan Freeman (Joseph Tagger).
August 1, 2014
By Manohla Dargis
Talking about directing in blockbusters is sometimes nothing more than wishful thinking. Most are such impersonally operated machines — dedicated to the business of brand storytelling — that they tend to obliterate any whisper of individuality. That there’s a palpable directorial sensibility in “Guardians of the Galaxy,” along with other signs of genuine life, helps separate this latest Marvel cash grab from a lot of off-the-rack movie cartoons. Here, a pulse, wit, beauty and a real sensibility have been slipped into the fray, alongside the clockwork guffaws, kabooms and splats.
Lifted by a cast of professional charmers and a “What, me worry?” vibe, “Guardians of the Galaxy” is one of those interstellar westerns about a motley group of appealing baddies who rise to the heroic occasion and ride to the rescue, on spaceships rather than Appaloosas. The John Wayne role here — or, really, the 1970s Harrison Ford one — belongs to Chris Pratt, an easygoing, comic performer who’s very good at putting up a persuasive cute-dumb front and then shifting into a slyer, more knowing register. Wearing a swinging duster and some fetishistic head gear, Mr. Pratt slides into “Guardians of the Galaxy” doing a Gene Kelly soft shoe, but is soon flexing his action-hero bona fides (bang-bang, etc.) as Peter Quill, a heavily armed professional scavenger.
Quill is a good and a sometimes bad guy who fights and jokes amid swirling, polychromatic smoke and cascading words like Xandarians, Morag and the Celestial (and awesome) Head. He comes into possession of a pretty blue rock that everyone would risk death trying to get, hence a throwaway about “The Maltese Falcon.” You see, in 1539, some crusading knights persuaded the king of Spain to give them the island of Malta. ... That’s not what happens in “Guardians,” which is based on a comic that first hit in 1969, but no matter. What counts are the dreams of Quill and his compatriots, including a wisecracking raccoon and an ambulatory tree, which have been ushered into existence by the director, James Gunn, with an eye to those who don’t know or care about the source material.
In other words, you don’t need to be held hostage by the Marvel Weltanschauung to enjoy “Guardians.” The story may be confusing and generic by turns, but if you shake off the bonds of narrative coherency it’s liberating letting the weird words — Yondu, Necrocraft, Sakkaran — just slide right past you, much like the zigzagging, exploding 3-D spaceships. What sticks are the fantastical landscapes, the beautiful creature designs and the actors delivering lively performances, even with strata of makeup and digital wizardry. Among the many amusements is the floating head (kind of like in “The Wizard of Oz”) that yells at a villain, Ronan (Lee Pace, with notes of “Star Wars” and “Prometheus”) who wants the blue rock so he can destroy Xandar, a post-racial Eden run by Nova Prime, a space-age Hillary Rodham Clinton (Glenn Close).
Filled with a multihued populace, Xandar is shiny, clean and bright, and looks familiar because it evokes both our world (one building suggests the Gherkin in London) and your favorite tattered science-fiction paperback. It’s nice if a little ho-hum (as utopias tend to be in movies), particularly when compared with the darkly colored, visually seductive realms and spaces conjured up by Mr. Gunn and his team. From location to location, and character to character, the quality of the special effects meets the demands of the imaginative designs in sweep and detail. There are different ways to get lost in a movie, and while “Guardians” takes you down one after another crazy narrative turn, it also pulls you into — and, for the most part, keeps you in — a fully realized other world.
That’s a relief, because the movie doesn’t start promisingly, opening with not one but two female clichés: the dead mother and the disposable chick. Both belong to Quill — he tells the chick, who enters with bed hair and not much else, that he forgot she was even there — and they suggest that however futuristic the movie may be, its sexual politics and worldview are antediluvian. (You have to wonder if the people who make these entertainments ever think about what such tired stereotypes say to young viewers, not to mention their own sons and daughters.) The sense that the movie’s appealingly old-fashioned jocularity, reminiscent of late Howard Hawks, has its fatal drawbacks dissipates with the introduction of Gamora (Zoe Saldana), a green, mean, not-so-jolly killing machine.
However familiar, Gamora turns out to be better than most Strong Female Characters — you know those girls: They’re fierce and finally inconsequential — that the blogger Tasha Robinson went after in a recent post about the so-called Trinity Syndrome. This pervasive sexist disorder affects a lot of filmmakers and is named for the “Matrix” character whose trajectory doesn’t deliver on her exciting promise. Gamora is given more to do than make a splashy entrance and wear tight costumes, and Ms. Saldana remains a charismatic screen presence, even when she trades in her Emma Peel-ish catsuits for a miniskirt, a costume change that’s accompanied by the image of a soft female hand resting on a strong male shoulder. This is another movie that mock-skewers the stereotypes it embraces.
It’s old news that the major studios, having long absorbed the lessons of B-movie titans like Roger Corman, are now primarily in the business of churning out big-ticket exploitation flicks. (As a studio executive said way back in 1975, “What was ‘Jaws’ but an old Corman monster-from-the-deep flick?”) It’s perfect, then, that Mr. Gunn, having started out working for Troma Entertainment, that gleeful purveyor of barrel-scraping trash, has been tapped by Marvel for its latest bid at box-office domination. He’s a funny guy who brings a light touch to cartoon violence, whether he’s going for giggles (as in “Slither”) or uglier yuks (“Super”). But in “Guardians of the Galaxy,” he also summons up some emotion and even quiet desperation amid the scares and the brutes like Drax (a terrific Dave Bautista).
Given these moments of feeling, it doesn’t seem accidental that two of the brightest characters in the movie, which Mr. Gunn wrote with Nicole Perlman, are the raccoon and the tree, both surprisingly melancholic figures whose presence proves more resonant than their patter. The raccoon, Rocket (given an effectively grating screech by Bradley Cooper), is a nasty, often crude piece of work who’s never as funny as he thinks. But, much like the tree, a gorgeously rendered creature called Groot (Vin Diesel, in his finest role since “The Iron Giant”) — who nibbles his own tender sprouts and, in a nod to the 1931 film “Frankenstein,” offers a child a bloom — the raccoon carries with him an air of regret, a sense of loss and despair that, in the end, speaks more to our world than to that of the movie.
“Guardians of the Galaxy” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Bloodless violence and soft expletives.
Guardians of the Galaxy
Opens on Friday
Directed by James Gunn; written by Mr. Gunn and Nicole Perlman, based on the comic-book series created by Arnold Drake and Gene Colan; director of photography, Ben Davis; edited by Fred Raskin, Craig Wood and Hughes Winborne; music by Tyler Bates; production design by Charles Wood; costumes by Alexandra Byrne; visual-effects supervisor, Stephane Ceretti; produced by Kevin Feige; released by Marvel Media. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute.
WITH: Chris Pratt (Peter Quill), Zoe Saldana (Gamora), Dave Bautista (Drax), Vin Diesel (voice of Groot), Bradley Cooper (voice of Rocket), Lee Pace (Ronan), Michael Rooker (Yondu), Karen Gillan (Nebula), Djimon Hounsou (Korath), John C. Reilly (Corpsman Rhomann Dey), Glenn Close (Nova Prime) and Benicio Del Toro (the Collector).
April 4, 2014
By Manohla Dargis
It’s a bird, it’s a plane — oh, wait, it’s Captain America.
The costume looks different, of course, as does the looker (Chris Evans) squeezed into the form-fitting corporate brand. But, gee, it can be hard keeping track of all the men flying and fighting in the superhero cinematic universe. Next up is yet another Spider-Man movie, and then come the X-Men, and then the Guardians of the Galaxy, and then (again) the Avengers, whose numbers include Captain America. So, he’ll be back. Meanwhile, he has another movie to call his own, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” one that, like many others of its type, gets off to a kinetic start only to lose steam before blowing everything up.
It’s fun until it goes kablooey, when the directors, the brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, are first warming up this sequel and scratching their initials next to the Marvel logo. The ticklish, loose opener finds Steve Rogers (Mr. Evans), Captain America’s Everyman alter ego, running laps around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He’s making such a good cartoonish time — he’s super in and out of costume — that he keeps lapping another runner while yelling, “On your left!” The laggard is Sam Wilson (the unfailingly charming Anthony Mackie), who becomes a down-to-earth friend and high-flying ally. (It’s nice to see talented American actors get some of the rewarding franchise action enjoyed by their British counterparts with Harry Potter.)
As with every new chapter in such series, introductions must be made in “The Winter Soldier” so that nonenthusiasts can meet the team members and grasp their place in this cosmos. Here, these include Bucky Barnes (a good Sebastian Stan), Natasha Romanoff a.k.a. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who run S.H.I.E.L.D., the spy agency that here gives the movie its topical gloss. Kevin Feige, who runs Marvel Studios, has said that the Russos were hired as directors “because they loved our explanation that we really want to make a ’70s political thriller masquerading as a big superhero movie.” That’s the idea anyway, which explains why Robert Redford, the star of ’70 paranoid classics like “Three Days of the Condor,” plays Alexander Pierce, a S.H.I.E.L.D. official.
The Russos have directed a few other movies, including “Welcome to Collinwood” (2002), a redo of the 1958 Italian satire “Big Deal on Madonna Street” that was produced by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney. That movie didn’t go anywhere, but, having been put on the industry map with that kind of patronage, it’s no surprise that the brothers went on to have a busy decade in television, working as directors and sometimes executive producers for the smart sitcom likes of “Arrested Development” and “Community.” In between, they also directed another movie, “You, Me and Dupree.” It was a dud, but it didn’t matter. In the magical world of big-screen entertainment, some guys get all the breaks and also the keys to the studio gate, meaning a franchise like this.
Given how little creative wiggle room there is in properties like “The Winter Soldier,” it’s a minor triumph that the Russos imprint any personality on the movie, which is less a stand-alone work than a part of an ever-expanding multimedia enterprise. The directors make their presence felt largely in the first half when they’re emphasizing Steve’s humanity, whether he’s in costume or not. That’s partly the point of his introductory race around the reflecting pool: He runs like the wind, but he also makes you laugh. This emphasis on the human also spills over into some exciting, smartly staged and shot action sequences, including choreographed fights in which the entire bodies of the performers remain visible in the frame and aren’t dissected by the camera and editing.
“The Winter Soldier” becomes progressively less enjoyable once the plot thickens and a menace looms, as Fury moves one chess piece, while Pierce moves another. Captain America doesn’t move much, beyond cars and debris. However appealing, Mr. Evans remains a recessive screen presence, and while it may be a relief that Captain America isn’t angst-ridden, he’s blandly well adjusted for a guy who, in his last movie, emerged from a decades-long deep freeze. Comic-book movie directors have to sell the prepackaged goods while trying to capture — and maybe redefine, as Christopher Nolan did with Batman — a superhero’s essence. And they have to do so without boring everyone who could not care less why a crusader went dark as night or that he died only to be reborn. But what if he’s kind of dull?
Heresy! Yet one of the problems with Captain America, who was introduced in 1941, is that he didn’t cross over into the mainstream until three years ago with “Captain America: The First Avenger.” Directed by Joe Johnston, who wisely kept the irony in check, “The First Avenger” hit the origin-story marks by tracing the metamorphosis of a 90-pound weakling into a World War II hero while showing that Mr. Evans could wear the suit and throw a punch. It was amusing, old-fashioned and ponderous, just like its protagonist. The sequel, which was also written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, suffers from some routine blockbuster sins, including an excess of plot. But it, too, doesn’t make the case on screen for why Captain America should have been taken out of mothballs.
Despite Mr. Evans’s stated lack of passion for playing super-characters like this one and despite the genre’s creeping exhaustion, Captain America seems likely to keep running and jumping. Unlike the James Bond movies, which have dribbled out fairly slowly or a series like Harry Potter, which has a finite number of exploitable titles, there appears to be no end in sight when it comes to superhero movies. Warner Bros. has introduced Batman twice in separate franchise cycles and Sony has done the same, at a faster clip, with Spider-Man. In other words, superhero stories have become, or at least some would claim, the Hollywood equivalent of, say, Shakespeare: a well that they return to again and again to reboot, remake, redesign and resell until death (ours, the art’s, the planet’s) do us part.
“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Comic-book movie mayhem.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Opens on Friday.
Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo; written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on the comic book series; director of photography, Trent Opaloch; edited by Jeffrey Ford and Matthew Schmidt; music by Henry Jackman; production design by Peter Wenham; visual effects supervisor, Dan Deleeuw; costumes by Judianna Markovsky; produced by Kevin Feige; released by Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes.
WITH: Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/Falcon), Cobie Smulders (Agent Maria Hill), Frank Grillo (Brock Rumlow), Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter), Toby Jones (Dr. Arnim Zola), Georges St-Pierre (Batroc), Robert Redford (Alexander Pierce) and Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury).
May 2, 2014
By Manohla Dargis
No bodices seem to have been harmed, much less ripped, during the making of “Belle,” a period film at once sweeping and intimate, about an 18th-century Englishwoman who transcends her historical moment. Even so, peekaboo bosoms tremble throughout the movie amid the rustle of luxurious gowns and the gasps of polite company as conventions are crushed underfoot. Melodramatic and grounded in history, “Belle” is enough of an old-fashioned entertainment that it could have been made in classic Hollywood. Well, except for one little thing that would have probably given old studio suits apoplexy: The movie’s prettily flouncing title character is biracial.
You meet her as a child, just as she’s being taken by her father, a navy captain, Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode), from some shadowy mystery hovel to a large country manor. There, in an elegantly appointed room, the kind that announces the refinement of its inhabitants and whispers their entitlement, Sir John formally claims the child as his own and promptly hands her over to his uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson, very good), and Lady Mansfield (a dry, funny Emily Watson). The Lord and Lady keep their lips, necks and manners stiff, but take the girl in and raise her as their own — or almost. Soon she’s laughing in the garden, and then she’s a genteel beauty (a fine Gugu Mbatha-Raw) facing life as a black woman in a slave-trading country.
She’s based on Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804), the daughter of an African woman, Maria Bell, who was probably enslaved and maybe captured off a ship by Sir John. The details of their association and Bell’s life are murky, but when Dido was young, Sir John took her to Lord Mansfield, who raised her alongside another grandniece, Elizabeth Murray (played by a strong Sarah Gadon). In one account, Thomas Hutchinson, a governor of Massachusetts, described visiting the family: “a Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies” and later walked arm in arm with one. “She had a very high cap, and her wool was much frizzled in her neck,” Hutchinson wrote, “but not enough to answer the large curls in fashion. She is neither handsome nor genteel — pert enough.”
An unusual painting of her and Elizabeth that shows the women smiling side by side on a terrace — both in silk gowns and pearls, and staring directly at us — suggests that there was far more to Dido than Hutchinson’s shabby account. The double portrait, often attributed to Johann Zoffany, now hangs in Scone Palace in Scotland but was painted at Kenwood House in Hampstead, England, where Dido lived for the first 30 or so years of her life. It’s an exciting image because she wasn’t painted in a traditional subservient pose but instead assumes an almost — if not quite — equal place with her cousin on the canvas. While Elizabeth stands as still as a vase, the somewhat exoticized Dido (she wears a turban) seems to have been, evocatively, captured in midflight.
The vivaciousness of Dido’s image doesn’t always come through in the movie portrait, which the director, Amma Asante, has created in the Merchant-Ivory school of serious, tasteful entertainments. It’s easy to mock such films, with their pretty manners and people, but, at their best, they open a door onto an old world that is sometimes more fragile, brittle, imperiled and considerably more complex than its sumptuous trappings at first suggest. Likewise here, Dido and her cousin, both cosseted and corseted, exist in near-pastoral harmony, yet their lives are nowhere as carefree as they seem. Elizabeth has a complicated history and needs, much like a Jane Austen heroine, to marry to ensure her future. And while Dido may be one of the family, she’s also sometimes kept segregated.
Written by Misan Sagay, “Belle” tracks its heroine’s dawning awareness of both her own social, political and legal position and that of the black slaves who, initially, exist for her only as abstractions. Her education comes through her uncle, the Lord Chief Justice, who has to decide on a horribly real case involving the Zong slave ship, as well as from an amusingly dashing suitor, John Davinier (Sam Reid). The movie plays with the historical record for dramatic effect, as is often the case when the past is disinterred for entertainment, and its realism at times groans under the weight of too many passionate speeches. Yet the weave of the personal and the political finally proves as irresistible as it is moving, partly because it has been drawn from extraordinary life.
“Belle” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Squeaky clean.
Belle
Opens on Friday.
Directed by Amma Asante; written by Misan Sagay; director of photography, Ben Smithard; edited by Pia Di Ciaulo and Victoria Boydell; music by Rachel Portman; production design by Simon Bowles; costumes by Anushia Nieradzik; produced by Damian Jones; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
WITH: Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Dido Elizabeth Belle), Tom Wilkinson (Lord Mansfield), Sam Reid (John Davinier), Sarah Gadon (Elizabeth Murray), Miranda Richardson (Lady Ashford), Penelope Wilton (Lady Mary Murray), Tom Felton (James Ashford), James Norton (Oliver Ashford), Matthew Goode (Capt. Sir John Lindsay) and Emily Watson (Lady Mansfield).
December 24, 2014
By Manohla Dargis
In late November when Warner Bros. hired Michelle MacLaren for its Wonder Woman movie, it became the first studio to tap a female director for a major superhero project. The news brought me back to the 1970s, when my sisters, mom and I would convene in front of the television to watch Wonder Woman fighting for our rights in her satin tights, as the goofy theme song put it. I don’t remember much about the show, but I do know that the vision of this strong woman triumphing with flowing hair and bulletproof bracelets delighted us. I’m looking forward to the movie, though as someone who watches films for a living, I would be happier if Warner Bros. hired a lot more women to direct its other titles.
The news of Ms. MacLaren’s hiring was big because, after years of young men in baseball caps being plucked from obscurity to direct blockbusters like “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Godzilla,” a woman was getting her shot. In indie arenas like the Sundance Film Festival, female directors have inched closer to gender parity, and in 2013, half the movies in the American dramatic competition were directed by women. But even in the hothouse world of Sundance equality isn’t a sure thing, and when the next festival starts in January, women will have about a third of the titles in the American dramatic competition. That’s not great, but by the end of this year, the six major studios (not including their art-house divisions) will have released three movies directed by women. It’s a number that should be a call to action.
“Incrementally, I think things are changing,” said Jodie Foster, who made her feature directing debut with “Little Man Tate” (1991). “When you decide to take a big pile of money and put it in a bag and hand it to a director who you don’t know — no matter what the person says in the room, no matter how much you know about them — you honestly do not know what’s going to happen.” The problem is that “no matter how many creative controls you take away from them you’re still stuck with the choice and decisions and vision of that person.” To lessen that risk, Ms. Foster said, in the past that meant hiring “someone who appeared less risky,” including directors who looked like the people doing the hiring.
Those doing the hiring used to be almost all men. In 1987, Dawn Steel became the president of Columbia Pictures, making her the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio. Since then, women have held power positions throughout the industry and two women now help run studios and others head up divisions. For years, I thought more female executives would mean more female directors. Yet sexism in the workplace doesn’t necessarily surface in clear, crude ways, and it’s unusual for anything damning or actionable in the movie business to leak out. Sexism there often works like a virus that spreads through ideas, gossip, and stories about women, their aesthetic visions and personal choices, and doubts about whether they can hack it in that male-dominated world. Of course, the end result is that female directors don’t get hired.
There isn’t a back-room cabal of cigar-chomping male — and female — executives conspiring against female directors, at least that I know of. Rather, the reluctance to hire women seems symptomatic of a conservative, fear-driven industry that recycles the same genres, stereotypes and impoverished ideas year after year. So, exactly like the outside world, the movie business clings to dusty stereotypes as when insiders refer to directors as generals and ship captains, as if today women don’t have those jobs. All that said, it remains surprising that the industry fails to grasp that women, on screen and behind the camera, are good for the bottom line. The evidence — “Waiting to Exhale,” “Mamma Mia,” “Sex and the City,” “Twilight,” “The Hunger Games,” “Frozen” — is indisputable.
In July, I asked Amy Pascal, the co-chairwoman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and chairman of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, which has released movies by directors like Nancy Meyers and Sofia Coppola, why she didn’t hire more women. “I try to,” she said quietly. And Ms. Foster is directing her next movie, “Money Monster,” a thriller with George Clooney, for a Sony division.
Hannah Minghella, a president of production for another Sony division, Columbia Pictures, who works down the hall from Ms. Pascal, said much the same. “I desperately want to hire female directors,” she said in August. I think she and Ms. Pascal were sincere, but good intentions don’t mean much when the six major studios consistently do not hire women even for smaller movies.
The recent hacking of Sony, seemingly prompted by North Korea’s lack of a sense of humor, has revealed private emails that seem to furnish evidence that the industry is every bit as sexist as its critics claim. Among the revelations were nasty digs at Angelina Jolie, who may star in the studio’s exhumation of “Cleopatra,” and apparent pay disparities for Ms. Minghella and Jennifer Lawrence, who starred in the studio’s “American Hustle.” On Monday, Ms. Pascal, speaking by phone from Vermont, addressed some of these issues while declining to discuss others, notably my question about why, in sharp contrast to her male colleagues, she had become the face of the crisis.
Ms. Pascal agreed that “there is a systemic problem in Hollywood, of course,” when it comes to women in the industry. But she said it was “ludicrous” to judge an “entire corporation” from “a few random emails, in fact, taken out of context.” She went on to list a number of movies about women or directed by women that her company has released, projects like Penny Marshall’s “A League of Their Own,” Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” and the female “Ghostbusters,” directed by Paul Feig, which starts in January. The studio is “committed to making movies about women,” Ms. Pascal said. “I don’t know if any other studio can say that.”
I can’t let Ms. Pascal off the hook. But women in power, often the beneficiaries of male munificence, tend to be treated harshly when they betray that gift by failing. That may help explain why female executives as a group are not better advocates for female directors. What makes this situation even more alarming is that women sometimes seem close to becoming an endangered species on American screens. The researcher Martha M. Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, found that in 2013, female characters made up just 15 percent of protagonists and 30 percent of all speaking characters in the top 100 grossing movies. Female directors tend to make more movies about women than male directors do — but they need the money or a job to tell those stories.
When discussing the hurdles faced by female directors, executives often point to the pool of talent. In September, Donna Langley, the chairwoman of Universal Pictures, said she and her team start with a list of candidates when looking for a director. “I don’t go through that with criteria of male or female,” she said, “even if it’s a big sort of action film.” The problem is who makes it onto that list. “When we start our interview process what I find is, more often than not, that the majority of candidates are male,” she said. Like other executives I spoke with, including Jonathan King, executive vice president of narrative film production at Participant Media, Ms. Langley invoked the types of movies that men tend to direct — the little monster movie, say, that leads to the big — that suggest a director can make the leap to big-studio work.
Yet cool portfolio films don’t explain this broken system, which is why Melissa Goodman uses words like bias, discrimination and civil rights when she talks about female directors. Ms. Goodman is the director of the LGBT, Gender and Reproductive Justice Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “There’s a culture in Hollywood that anti-discrimination laws don’t apply,” she said, but “Hollywood is not a law-free zone.”
In late October, I visited her office in downtown Los Angeles to talk about the A.C.L.U. webpage called “Tell Us Your Story,” which is asking female directors to submit the kinds of stories few share publicly. The A.C.L.U., she said, hopes to understand the specific barriers that keep women out and underemployed.
The truth is that even female directors with a good track record don’t get hired. “It’s hard to talk about your career and your life and having had a feature career and then not having one,” Mimi Leder said when we met in August. She turned down a lot of work after directing the hit action movie “Deep Impact” (1998) to spend time with her daughter. “Perhaps it hurt my career,” Ms. Leder said, “but it didn’t hurt my life.”
She went on to direct “Pay It Forward,” a 2000 flop that landed her “in movie jail,” where many female directors seem to languish longer than their male counterparts. More recently, she has been directing episodes of the HBO show “The Leftovers.” When I mentioned that Ms. Pascal said she tried to hire women, Ms. Leder shot back, “Well, Amy Pascal has never asked me to make a film.”
The Directors Guild of America website has pages filled with the names of its female members. You can find Ms. Leder among them, but many of the names will be unfamiliar because these women haven’t broken out. In early and silent cinema several dozen women, many lost and forgotten, directed films in the United States, including Alice Guy Blaché, believed to be the first female director. By the late 1920s, female directors had become the industry’s real gone girls and from then until the mid-1960s only two women are thought to have directed in Hollywood: Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino. There are many more female directors now, as the Directors Guild site shows. But many of them face a vicious cycle: if a woman isn’t hired she can’t get experience, but she can’t get experience if no one hires her. “I think we have to be better as an industry,” Ms. Minghella said, “about giving more women the opportunity to prove themselves in the way that men so often are.”
Scholars have theorized that women were squeezed out of the industry once the business of movies became big business. Money — getting it, keeping it and putting it on screen — remains one of the biggest barriers that female directors confront. The producer Cathy Schulman (“Crash”) is the president of the production company Mandalay Pictures and of the advocacy group Women in Film. She has a history of success. But, she blurted out in an interview in August, “My success rate is horrific in getting the movies with female directors made.”
It was such a surprisingly candid admission that I asked her to repeat it. She did, adding: “I can’t get the money. It’s not the projects, it’s not the development, it’s not the writers, it’s not the directors and the actors. It’s the money.”
The producer Cassian Elwes, who’s helped get movies like “Dallas Buyers Club” off the ground, said that equity financiers want to make good movies. The “tricky part,” Mr. Elwes said, is that foreign sales companies provide the presale estimates for the value of a movie in territories outside the United States. Producers are able to borrow money against those estimates to help finance the movie. “And the moment that you mention that it’s a female director” to foreign sales companies, Mr. Elwes said, “you can see the eyes start to roll.” It is, he said, “a male-dominated world.” He added: “The buyers want action films and they don’t see women as action directors. That’s where the whole thing kind of blows up.”
Among the female stories that Ms. Pascal helped shepherd earlier in her career was a lovely adaptation of that classic, “Little Women,” by Gillian Armstrong. Ms. Pascal had her share of critical and commercial successes, but those films were often also singled out for their subjects: women. In 2000, Variety predicted that Ms. Pascal’s forthcoming releases would “go a long way toward restoring some hormonal balance to the femme-heavy offerings marking her reign.” Movies like “The Patriot” and “The Hollow Man,” the article continued, as if to reassure anxious men everywhere, “will all provide a sharp blast of testosterone to the screen — and, it is hoped, a shot of adrenaline to the Sony ledgers.” That year, its biggest hit turned out to be the femme-heavy “Charlie’s Angels.”
Back in July I asked Ms. Pascal if those digs about the movies she made with women had affected her. She said that for a long time she felt “really embarrassed by that, because chick flicks are movies about girls who don’t work. They’re not really movies about girls who do. But then, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, that’s all she can do.’ So, maybe I overcorrected a little bit. Maybe I overcorrected and that’s not really a good thing to do.” She expressed excitement about some of the hits with female protagonists that had come out in the summer, though none were from Sony. “I think that the world has moved on,” she said, “and we’re not acknowledging it.”
In August, Sony announced that it was developing a female superhero for its “Spider-Man” franchise. No word yet on a director.
By Manohla Dargis
“You see,” Sherlock Holmes tells Dr. Watson in story after story, “but you do not observe.” In her witty, erudite and eminently readable writings on film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis consistently does both.
For film critics, a looming pitfall is the seduction of synopsis: It is all too easy to file a review that is little more than a summary of the action on screen. Since Dargis joined The Times as a chief film critic in 2004, she has elegantly sidestepped this trap in the more than 100 reviews and feature articles she writes each year.
In her hands, a review is no mere reprise. Instead, she draws on a command of film history that stretches from the silent era to the avant-garde and leads readers on a cleareyed exploration of a film as a social document — a document that bears the imprint of the culture in which it was made.
In particular, Dargis, one of the few female staff critics for a large-circulation daily newspaper, has long been concerned with the ways the movie industry endeavors to depict, cast and appeal to women — with or without success. Consider her take on Angelina Jolie’s film “Maleficent”:
“In broad strokes, ‘Maleficent’ is Disney’s latest bid to recast a dusty story for a contemporary audience, one that has, over the years, complained with good reason about the company’s representations, particularly of female characters. For decades, Disney has responded with an array of plucky girls and women whose desires extend beyond romantic longing. Usually, they have adventures, and not just dreams, to go with their wasp waists and froufrou. Sometimes
they save the day and their true love, which is better and more fun than waiting to be saved. Yet Disney heroines, whether princesses or not, have almost always ended up as reliably paired off as if they were boarding Noah’s ark.”
Though Dargis makes clear that a film career still entails big obstacles for women, her writing is cautiously hopeful, reminding readers that a place has opened at the table for women as actors, directors, audience members and readers and writers of criticism — though not as large as might be wished.
Writing from Alabama about the making of a civil-rights film, “Selma,” directed by Ava DuVernay, a black woman, she wrote: “As she called ‘Action!,’ and people and horses began to run, smoke flooding the air, it was thrilling to witness a female director bring this agonizing American story to life and,
in the process, stake her own claim on our cultural history.”
As she also pointed out, however, it will take more than such filmmakers “to disrupt the industry’s sexism, which has long shut women out from directing movies and, increasingly, shuts them out on screen, too. … Gender equality is an undeniable imperative. But it’s also essential to the future of the movies: This
American art became great with stories about men and women, not just a superhero and some token chick.”
The holder of a master’s degree in cinema studies from New York University, she can discourse informatively in print on camera angles, cinematography and actors’ on-screen iconography. Yet thanks to her lively prose, mordant insights, playful sensibility and descriptive power, her work remains utterly accessible to a general readership.
“The film’s visual style is precise, unassuming to the point of seeming invisibility and in the service of the characters, with compositions that remain unfussy and uncluttered, even when the rooms are busy,” she writes of “Boyhood,” one of the most talked-about motion pictures of 2014, shot by Richard Linklater over 12 years. She adds of Linklater, “He’s a poet-geometrician of intimacy.”
In covering a business that expects critics to serve as de facto publicists, Dargis makes it plain, in her uncompromising reviews and her rigorously reported articles, that though she loves the cinema and understands it deeply, she will never be in thrall to it. In so doing, she urges readers to think twice
about experts’ opinions about films and to ask why those opinions came to dominate public discussion in the first place.
Dargis describes “Belle,” a movie about the mixed-race daughter of a noble 18th-century English family, as being “in the Merchant-Ivory school of serious, tasteful entertainments.” But she continues, tellingly, “It’s easy to mock such films, with their pretty manners and people, but, at their best, they open
a door onto an old world that is sometimes more fragile, brittle, imperiled and considerably more complex than its sumptuous trappings at first suggest.”
Though her every column is impeccably self-contained, her body of work forms a bracing, continuing conversation about the way we live now. Evocative and unflinching, her writing bears witness to her faith that cinema can reflect the world in which we live and, if we are very lucky, transform it. We are proud
to nominate Manohla Dargis for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Biography
Manohla Dargis is a chief film critic for The New York Times.
Winners
Prize Winner in Criticism in 2015:
Mary McNamara
For savvy criticism that uses shrewdness, humor and an insider's view to show how both subtle and seismic shifts in the cultural landscape affect television.
Criticism
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Criticism in 2015:
Stephanie Zacharek
For film criticism that combines the pleasure of intellectual exuberance, the perspective of experience and the transporting power of good writing.
The Jury
The Jury
Gail Caldwell(Chair )*
author
Eric Banks
director
Michael Phillips
film critic
Connie Schultz*
columnist
Bill Wyman
author and cultural critic
Winners in Criticism
Inga Saffron
For her criticism of architecture that blends expertise, civic passion and sheer readability into arguments that consistently stimulate and surprise.
Philip Kennicott
For his eloquent and passionate essays on art and the social forces that underlie it, a critic who always strives to make his topics and targets relevant to readers.
Wesley Morris
For his smart, inventive film criticism, distinguished by pinpoint prose and an easy traverse between the art house and the big-screen box office.
Sebastian Smee
For his vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing great works to life with love and appreciation.
2015 Prize Winners
Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Julia Wolfe
A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
David I. Kertzer
An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.