Gloria Bell (2018)

I am familiar with La Mujer Fantastica, which has a similar use of light and the same enchanting use of music. That was my favorite part. Gloria Bell is a remake of the Chilean film Gloria that I hear is exactly the same, frame for frame, song for song, same crew and all.  I haven't seen the original but I don't really understand why this was necessary except as a vehicle for Julianne Moore. She is excellent and quite funny in a role that is rare for an actress of her age but that's beside the point. Did the director feel compelled to remake his own film in English? Is he saying something about universality?  Was an American audience not willing to watch a more culturally specific movie? Are older white singles really into Earth, Wind and Fire?

Wonderstruck (2017)

Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful movie. The black-and-white 1920s cinematography is gorgeous. The production design and costumes for the 20s and 70s are both fantastic. The look of the movie and the music are mesmerizing. The final fifteen minutes especially of the stop motion dioramas are magical. The kids are great actors too. Where I didn't love the movie: I don't think the plot quite paid off enough given how slowly it built up. I think it'd have difficulty holding the attention of the kids it was meant for. But it might seem a little too kiddie for the adults that might appreciate the artistry of it. Rose's story and Ben's story are obviously headed for a collision. And they do. The parallels are clear. But we could've gotten just Ben's story without Rose's and we wouldn't really have lost anything because Rose's story is not relevant to understanding Ben's. In that sense, they don't quite collide enough. What I do love is the New York story. New York is a beautiful city with a beautiful history and beautiful institutions. It's a piece imagining the city in the context of real history: the World's Fair, the Blackout of 77. It does a lot of things right--it's just not as enjoyable as I had hoped.

Kingsman: The Golden Circled (2017)

Kingsman was a pleasant surprise the first time. But it's much less fun the second go around. It's kind of tired. There's a handful of Oscar winners somehow. It was a miracle they got Colin Firth the first time, but now they've added Julianne Moore, Halle Berry, Jeff Bridges and Sir Elton John. Elton John is just wacky enough to make it work (he might be the strangest and best part of the movie) and Julianne Moore too, but Berry and Bridges are wasted. And I guess that's part of the farce. This movie is quite long. It's unnecessarily more vulgar without a payoff. The action scenes are very exciting. And the Americans are stereotyped maybe a little too on the nose for comfort.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay--Part 2 (2015)

This is a much darker film than other blockbuster series. And that tone matches the the book but I didn't really like the last book. The Hunger Games series was great because of the hunger games. But the last two films don't feature a hunger games. They focus instead on rebellion, which is complicated, cynical and messy. Much of this final movie is spent filming propaganda. And there is no glamour in propaganda. There is no glamour in war. It makes you long for the extravagance of the earlier films. Jennifer Lawrence can do no wrong-- she'll forever be known as The Girl on Fire. The novelty has kind of worn off now that dystopian teen fiction is everywhere, only exacerbated by splitting the final book (arguably the worst one) into two films.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I (2014)

The penultimate Hunger Games film is all about setting up the final battle between Katniss and the Capital.  Where this movie fails is that it does not give the viewers quite enough.  When it comes down to it, just not that much happened and the action was kind of lacking. I, for one, am not a fan of the recent trend of splitting the final book of a series into two parts. To be fair, I was not particularly fond of the last installment of Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy anyways.

But this movie does some things right.  With an ensemble cast, there are some very solid performances. This is one of Philip Seymour Hoffman's final roles and his performance does his legacy justice.  And Jennifer Lawrence is good in everything she does (though she doesn't do anything terribly special).  This film does lack the stylish glitz and glamour of the Capital, and the intensity of the Hunger Games that stood out in the first two films.     

I'm Not There (2007)

I'm Not There is a very innovative biopic that very loosely based on "the many lives" of Bob Dylan.  Dylan is played by six different actors, including a black child actor, and a woman.  Each character goes by a different name (none of them Bob or Dylan) and they represent different stages of Dylan's life, or rather different parts of his persona.  Cate Blanchett was especially convincing playing a 60s-era Dylan.  I wish I knew a little more about Bob Dylan because I feel like I missed out on a lot of the details that were included in the film that allude to his life.

The film is very stylish with two of the six actors being portrayed in black and white, and one of the six being portrayed in a documentary format.  Time is not linear in the slightest, jumping constantly between personas.  The whole thing is very surreal and sometimes you're not quite sure what to make of what you're seeing on screen.  But it is fitting for such an enigmatic man as Bob Dylan.

The film opens with a motorcycle accident (a reference to Dylan's own motorcycle accident) and Jude Quinn's subsequent autopsy.  I could not help but draw a parallel to the opening of Lawrence of Arabia, another biopic about a complex man who wore different personas in different phases of his life.  

Still Alice (2014)

Julianne Moore is a top contender for the Academy Award for Best Actress this year with very good reason.  Her performance as a Columbia professor with early onset Alzheimer's disease is touching.  We watch Moore transform as her disease progresses in some very emotional, but not overly sentimental, scenes.  One of the most poignant scenes comes when Alice gives a speech at an Alzheimer's conference, resourcefully overcoming her disability to give a beautiful speech.  The movie is not just about deterioration of a brilliant mind, but also has its own moments of joy as life does.  The movie's depiction of Alzheimer's is brutally honest but it refrains from being cliched.

I came into the movie expecting  an excellent performance from Julianne Moore, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a very good supporting cast as well.  Alzheimer's affects the whole family and Alice's children and husband each react in their own ways.  It is interesting to see the different responses of Alice's two daughters, one of whom is played by Kristen Stewart.  She has broken out of her restrictively flat Twilight character to surprisingly show some real depth in a few scenes. Keep an eye out for more good work from Stewart.