Movie Review: Spectre (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


A bravura, single-take shot launches Spectre, the latest 007 film. Sam Mendes helms this follow-up to his brilliant Skyfall, with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema stepping into Roger Deakins' big shoes. Van Hoytema certainly announces himself loudly with the shot that propels one of Bond's best opening sequences in some time. The camera snakes through Mexico City during a colorful Day of the Dead festival, first following a thug clad in a light colored suit, before switching over to a masked reveler dressed in a skeletal suit with a top hat whose distinctive walk soon makes it clear we are seeing Daniel Craig's superspy in medias res. Before long, Van Hoytema has taken us through a busy public square, up a palatial set of stairs, into and out of a cramped elevator, into a bedroom and out a window to a balcony where Bond sets up to assassinate the thug in question. For those brief minutes, Spectre soars higher than even Skyfall did. It all goes downhill from there sadly, with Spectre devolving into probably the most conventional of all the Craig flicks (yes, more so than even the unfairly maligned Quantum of Solace).

Movie Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Unless you're one of the multitude of Wes Anderson detractors—I lump these in with critics of directors like Tim Burton, the Coens and other filmmakers who mistake their unique, oddball aesthetics, clarity of vision, and consistency for laziness and a failure to evolve—then you probably subscribe to the idea that there are no bad Anderson films, just lesser ones. (This was sort of my answer to a recent poll inquiring about the best/worst Anderson films.) In fact, though I'm partial to The Royal Tenenbaums myself, The Grand Budapest Hotel might possibly be even better than that. It will take some time to fully grasp whether that's really the case or not. But it's really an argument of degrees, isn't it? This is to say that The Grand Budapest Hotel is a refinement of what Wes Anderson has always focused on in his films.

NYFF51 Review Wrap-Up: Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2) (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

Two of the year's best performances, female and otherwise, are found in this year's problematic Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2). Abdellatif Kechiche's 3-hour lesbian romance stars Adèle Exarchopoulos as Adèle and Léa Seydoux as Emma, two young women who embark on a passionate love affair with serious, life-changing consequences for at least one of them. That would be Adèle, who the movie follows from her high school years on through to her first years as a schoolteacher.