The Tree of Life @ 10: The wonder of the movie theater

by Cláudio Alves

As a Portuguese cinephile, the last few weeks have been a weird mixture of happiness for others and ugly jealousy. Looking on social media, I can see international friends returning to movie theaters, fully vaccinated, while I remain at home, not knowing when such privileges will be accessible. I realize this bitterness is wrong, but I can't help it. I miss going to the movies quite terribly. I miss being engulfed by the images projected on the big screen and feeling a wall of sound crash over my head like a tidal wave. However, unlike other filmgoers, I don't care too much about the communal aspect of the experience (with the exception of film festivals).

As a way of exorcising these demons and explaining the yearning, let me describe one of the most memorable filmgoing experiences I can remember. It happened around a decade ago, upon The Tree of Life's release…

Click to read more ...

Review: Song to Song

By Eric Blume

It’s difficult to review Song to Song, the latest film from Terrence Malick, because based on the standards of cinema (plot, characters, structure, acting, etc.), it’s a pretty terrible movie.  But with this film, Malick continues his journey to discover some sort of new cinematic language and style that has a weird beauty all its own.

The story, such as it is, revolves around three people in the music business (played by Michael Fassbender, Rooney Mara, and Ryan Gosling).  They go in and out of relationships with each other and a few other folks (notably Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, and Bond girl Berenice Marlohe).  Malick gives you no real sense of time, so it’s never 100% clear what happens when exactly.  But there are many, many scenes with those five people running their hands over each others’ bodies while voiceover proclaims banalities about sex and connection...   

Click to read more ...

Tree of Life Revisited

This weekend a friend of mine invited me to join him for a screening at BAM of Terence Malick's The Tree of Life with a live orchestra. 'But that's only for silent films,' I thought. I said yes right away more to spend time with my friend than to see the film again which I had very much admired but not quite loved in 2011.

Seeing it again five years later proved unexpectedly rewarding. Perhaps it was the huge screen - the first time I'd seen it was on a tiny arthouse screen in Manhattan. Perhaps it was the live accompaniment of a huge orchestra and choir but it felt newly electric...

Click to read more ...

Posterized: Tye Sheridan

They grow up so fast *sniffle*. Tye Sheridan, the child actor revelation from Terence Malick's The Tree of Life (quite a debut) and Mud is already 19 years old and in major demand. What accounts for his mutant super power of aging rapidly is that Tree of Life actually began shooting when Tye was just 11. Malick takes forever in post production, don'cha know. Male stars don't tend to really come into their A list own until their late 20s or early 30s. DiCaprio is the grand exception to the rule but usually the ones that break out in their late teens or early 20s more commonly have career trajectories, like, oh, Chris O'Donnell. That's partially because the juicy roles for men tend to be the ones that require a 30 or 40something actor.  So it's anyone's guess as to whether or not Sheridan can build on his rather solid first five years in the movies. Are you that anyone? Care to take a guess?

While Sheridan isn't the star of X-Men Apocalypse -- the movies are STILL obsessed with making it all about Magneto, Xavier, Wolverine, and Mystique (sigh) even though we've seen that dynamic five times already (fwiw Wolverine is reduced to a cameo this time but he takes over the movie for a couple of minutes). If the franchise can ever reach for the ensemble magnificence of its source material, Sheridan would be in a great position to collect more than just a paycheck as Scott Summers, aka Cyclops, one of the most enduring and important characters in the books. (He's also onscreens right now in Last Days in the Desert which stars Ewan McGregor as both Jesus and Satan.)

How many of his 10 pictures to date have you seen? 

Next up for Sheridan, if it gets distribution, is Detour (reviewed at Tribeca), presumably more X-Men features as well as more leading roles including Friday's Child,  the crime aftermath drama Grass Stains, the Iraq war soldier drama The Yellow Birds (which he co-leads with Alden Ehrenreich), and Spielberg's sci-fi flick Ready Player One. 2017 could be the star-making year for him if two of those break out strong.

"Brother. Mother. It was they who led me to your door"

Click to read more ...