by Lee Purvey

by Lee Purvey

by Lee Purvey

​A nation with a complex and largely unspoken history of economic injustice, destruction of indigenous culture, and state-sanctioned violence, Chile is a ripe setting for Pablo Larraín’s new film, The Club, a blackly comic psychodrama that uses the Catholic Church as a vehicle to explore the interaction of blame, repression, and penance in modern life. Shot in impressionist blues and greys through fisheye lenses, the screen swells with the festering stench of its contents, evoking the warped delusion of nearly everyone that passes through the frame.

by Lee Purvey

by Lee Purvey

​Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant belongs to a class of film one might term “bro realism.” Over the past 10 years, a handful of male Western filmmakers -- among them John Hillcoat (who was at one point in talks to direct The Revenant), Derek Cianfrance, Jeremy Saulnier, and David Cronenberg -- have made a number of films which establish a new vocabulary of deadpan violence and dramatic nihilism within independent cinema. In their stories of revenge and self-destruction -- which endeavor to comment on violence, as much as they capitalize on its aesthetic and dramatic appeal -- these directors exchange the playful camp of turn-of-the-century genre nerds like Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi for a blunter relationship to violence onscreen. (This violence is usually of the physical variety, although the same lens can be applied to the emotional, as in Cianfrance’s punishing Blue Valentine.) Though this trend has produced some genuinely good filmmaking (notably Hillcoat’s The Proposition and The Road), there is something painfully juvenile about these filmmakers’ philosophy -- a headier, grown-up version of the kind of contrarianism that might send preteens to Harmony Korine or Ayn Rand.

by Lee Purvey

The Big Short’s sticky hypocrisy lies in its choice of characters. If its incisive denouement is any indication, the aspirations of Adam McKay’s new issue dramedy are basically populist. In his closing lament, resident good guy polemicist Mark Baum (Steve Carell) describes a parallel world in which the 2007-08 financial crisis spelled an end to the worst in American capitalism, before pulling this illusive tapestry out from under our feet. And yet, McKay’s heroes (Baum included) are as distant from the crisis’ worldwide aftershocks -- in the U.S., 10 percent unemployment rates, plummeting average incomes and housing values -- as the bankers who were the recession’s real authors. Indeed, while the dust was settling around Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, Baum and his associates were part of a small Wall Street minority getting incredibly rich.

by Lee Purvey

​The coming of age story, as much as any Western subgenre, tends to work off a pretty limited tonal palette. Whether it’s the accessible black-sheep-makes-good trajectories of most mainstream offerings (Almost Famous, The Breakfast Club) or the slightly headier tack of independent exercises in exultance like Boyhood and The Tree of Life, the coming of age flick can usually be counted on for at least one thing, and that’s catharsis. The mode of delivery may vary -- from rote moral resolution to the more nebulous manipulation of nostalgia and mood used by Linklater and Malick -- but the guarantee of the kind of seismic emotions one tends to associate with our bodies’ glandular heyday stays pretty much the same. Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders is the exception to this rule, exchanging the conventions of independent cinema’s least experimental genre for a much subtler mission: the meticulous documentation of the shifting moods, hopes, desires, and grudges contained in the day-to-day existence of a single family, as their eldest toes the line of womanhood.

by Lee Purvey

A line from Kierkegaard, placed halfway through Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, neatly summarizes the director’s project with the film: “Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards.”
 
These words are at the heart of this ambitious, thoughtful documentary, in which, by attempting to assemble meaning from a number of lives already lost—foremost among them the artist’s beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle—Anderson turns to the past to cope with a pain she continues to carry.

by Lee Purvey

It seems like every four years the definition of “America” -- which, we’ll remember, is only a proper noun -- gets dragged out and publicly renegotiated in our national consciousness. In our contemporary political landscape, so many of the issues that inform our executive elections -- from immigration to Second Amendment rights to government surveillance to foreign policy -- provide a canvas upon which wildly disparate ideas of some presumed national character get inscribed. With the campaigns for the White House and the Academy Awards both underway, films like Brooklyn and Bridge of Spies have begun to appear: movies endeavoring to make sense of a nation that has survived centuries of political and demographic flux. What is America, these films ask? And who gets to enjoy the identity and attendant rights of participation in this national community?

by Lee Purvey

​The 2010 mining accident depicted in The 33 -- in which that number of Chilean men found themselves trapped underground for more than two months before their eventual rescue -- exists too immediately in our collective memory for anyone to be surprised by the film’s ending. The image of the miners emerging one by one from a rescue capsule that lifted them 700 meters from beneath the earth was broadcast internationally to an audience intrigued by the peculiar drama of their story. Though well aware she is playing with an open hand in her new feature, director Patricia Riggen is surprisingly willing to let the same question that so many wondered five years ago -- Will the miners make it out alive? -- dictate the parameters of her retelling of this true event.