Freeze Frame: Mindhunter (2017)

by Tony Dayoub

Adapted by Joe Penhall from the book by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Netflix's 10-episode Mindhunter is my latest binge-worthy obsession.

Movie Review: Pawn Sacrifice (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


The intrigue of a monarch marshaling his forces against an insurgent has been fodder for exciting movies stretching back for decades. When the soldiers are only an inch high and the battlefield is a chessboard the chances of eliciting the same thrills are much, much lower. Fascinating as it is, Edward Zwick's Pawn Sacrifice misses the mark often enough to keep it from being a full-on masterpiece. On occasion though, this spare biography of tormented chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) and the performances of its dynamic ensemble cast are riveting.

Movie Review: A Little Chaos (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


Kate Winslet adds another to her already long list of costume dramas with A Little Chaos, the second film directed by actor Alan Rickman. Winslet plays Madame Sabine de Barra, an anachronistically liberated gardener hired by Monsieur André le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts), landscaper to King Louis IV (Rickman). De Barra is to work on an outdoor ballroom at the King's gardens in Versailles. Her independence first perturbs Le Nôtre and his male contractors. But eventually his bewilderment gives way to curiosity and then romantic fascination with the confident gardener. Her sureness in herself eventually impresses even the king himself.

Movie Review: The Water Diviner (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


Who knew that the usually brutish Russell Crowe could be sensitive enough to fashion a film as lyrical as The Water Diviner? By turns epic and intimate, The Water Diviner is a low-key directorial debut for the macho Australian actor who stars as Joshua Connor, a man who lost three sons on the same day in the Battle of Gallipoli. Determined to bring their remains back to Australia, Connor sets out for Çanakkale, Turkey and encounters a larger number of Turks sympathetic to his mission than anyone could imagine. Among them is the beautiful young Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko), a woman who also sacrificed a great deal during the war. As conventional as the story reads on paper, Crowe instills it with an unpredictability and earnestness that seem damn near inventive. From a hauntingly surreal opening through a dewy, personal second act and onto a grand, epic conclusion, The Water Diviner frequently confounds, not just because of who Crowe is and what one expects from the forceful actor. But also because Crowe shows a remarkable self-confidence, letting the film meander in a way one associates most with the most unpretentious classic films.

Movie Review: Selma (2014)

by Tony Dayoub


Director Ava Duvernay smartly avoids the usual obstacles filmmakers have encountered when bringing the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the screen. Selma avoids all the pitfalls of the traditional biopic by instead focusing on a particularly reprehensible flashpoint in the American Civil Rights struggle, the events surrounding March 7, 1965, "Bloody Sunday," and how they ultimately led to the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By homing in on this historical moment, Duvernay is able to give us a snapshot of the era, put us in the shoes of African American activists, the Southern whites hanging on to their fading power structure, even the President himself, Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson). In Selma, Duvernay has crafted a singular cinematic experience that stands alone among those attempting to communicate the turmoil of the Civil Rights era and the power of the Reverend Dr. King, powerfully played by David Oyelowo. Selma is absorbing, measured, and eloquent, much like the man at its center.

NYFF52 Review: Mr. Turner (2014)

by Tony Dayoub


A tour-de-force performance by character actor Timothy Spall brightens the otherwise languid Mr. Turner, director Mike Leigh's biopic of English painter J.M.W. Turner. Although filled with terrific performances from recurring members of Leigh's acting troupe, Mr. Turner revels a mite too long in the gorgeous landscapes that inspired Turner (as shot by cinematographer Dick Pope). At times, it allows one to consider the effect such vistas had on Turner's art. Often, though, the movie borders on the ponderous and only Spall's earthy grumbles and snorts keep us tethered to the movie's titular subject.

NYFF52 Review: Pasolini (2014)

by Tony Dayoub


Controversial Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini finally gets a kind of a biopic in Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe. A journalist, poet, and philosopher among other things, the homosexual Pasolini is a tough subject to try to encapsulate in a film, especially one with as short a running time as this one's 87 minutes. Director Abel Ferrara, no stranger to controversy himself, wisely chooses to simply focus on the final days leading up to Pasolini's lurid murder. The resulting film is, like the director, a study of contradictions and not just a little perplexing.

Movie Review: The Notebook (Le Grand Cahier ) (2013)

by Tony Dayoub


Hungary's The Notebook (Le Grand Cahier) is another in a long line of films in which Nazi occupation is viewed through the eyes of children. The Tin Drum and Au revoir les enfants are two that have been reviewed here. Like with those movies, The Notebook is structured in an episodic fashion. Usually, this gives a clearer if somewhat simplified perspective on the horrors of war. But there's a sadistic streak in The Notebook's two central characters, unnamed Twins (László and András Gyémánt), that marks it as far more harrowing film contemplating how exposure to violence only begets more violence.

Movie Review: A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014)

by Tony Dayoub


The last time we saw private eye Matthew Scudder, he had a sunnier disposition and resembled Jeff Bridges. This was in his first film appearance, 1986's nasty 8 Million Ways to Die (Hal Ashby's muddled final movie, written by Oliver Stone and a pseudonymous Robert Towne). Nearly 30 years on, Liam Neeson plays the detective in the unbelievably grimmer A Walk Among the Tombstones. It's a serviceable throwback to cult detective thrillers from the 70s like The Long Goodbye or Night Moves, movies with a flawed antihero at the center of a mystery that's really just an excuse to meet a cast of quirky supporting characters. So who better to direct it than Scott Frank, screenwriter for a number crime films based on literary potboilers and chock full of such eccentrics: Get Shorty, Heaven's Prisoners, Out of Sight, and the never-aired pilot for Hoke.

TV Review: Houdini (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Houdini begins with master escape artist Harry Houdini (Adrien Brody) in chains, plunging into a frozen river from St. Louis's Eads Bridge. It's a representative flashpoint the miniseries will go back to at the end of its first half and at the start of its second. In between, Uli Edel's miniseries scrutinizes the enigmatic Houdini's personal life more than previous projects. Using the framework of a relatively obscure book, Houdini: A Mind in Chains - A Psychoanalytic Portrait, it tries to explain some of what actually motivated the man.

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Movie Review: Yves Saint Laurent (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

French biopic Yves Saint Laurent is at once sincere and reductive. Framed as a reminiscence by his business and life partner Pierre Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne), the movie sometimes plays like a telefilm truncated for a pre-arranged timeslot on Lifetime. The majority of its running time is allotted for the most interesting part of course, the meteoric rise of Saint Laurent (Pierre Niney). Before becoming a famed couturier in his own right he was an assistant to another fashion icon, Christian Dior, whose untimely death placed Saint Laurent atop the House of Dior as head designer at the unprecedented age of 21. Other formative experiences, such as a hospitalization that included electroshock therapy after his aborted conscription into the French Army, are elided over in a manner not unlike that of a footnote in a magazine profile.

Movie Review: Jersey Boys (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Clint Eastwood, a usually reliable filmmaker, is virtually invisible while directing Jersey Boys, an adaptation of the Broadway musical depicting the rise and ultimate dissolution of the rock/doo-wop icons, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Instead, Eastwood stands aside in deference to the material, a by-the-numbers biopic that would be merely serviceable were it not for the group's memorable music. Thanks to the Internet, though, you can queue up "Rag Doll", "Dawn", "December, 1963", or any other Four Seasons song on iTunes or YouTube any old time. So what's left is a mildly interesting story that isn't unique enough to stand above your typical Lifetime TV movie.

Movie Review: Ida (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Director Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida takes a most unusual approach to the legacy of pain inflicted by the Holocaust. Rather than come across as an historical document or an eloquent epic of torment the way Shoah, Schindler's List and countless others have, Ida expresses itself in miniature. Only 80 minutes long and shot in black-and-white in the square 1.37:1 aspect ratio, Ida is beautiful in its austerity, perfectly representing its central figure, a naive 18-year-old nun named Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) who makes a discovery that launches her into a personal inquest into her own identity.

Movie Review: Belle (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Belle is a film that holds as many surprises as its lead character, played by the electrifying Gugu Mbatha-Raw. On the surface it's a costume drama about the young, mixed-race Dido Elizabeth Belle, brought up in an upper class British household led by her grandfather, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson), England's Chief Justice (second in power only to the king, as one man puts it). In private, Dido is treated as separate but equal to her cousin Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon). In public, though, she is forced to play the deferential role blacks were expected to, walking a few steps behind the rest of her family, waiting in the drawing room while they finish their meals in the dining room with any invited guests. A curious turn of events makes Dido an heiress to her father's great fortune while leaving Elizabeth penniless, giving Dido the surprising upper hand in finding a suitable marriage partner.

Movie Review: Rob the Mob (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

They just don't make enough New York mob movies anymore, something I was reminded of by the endearing Rob the Mob. Director Raymond De Felitta clearly loves this kind of film, long on New York iconography and staffed by a panoply of Italian-American actors who directors like Sidney Lumet and spiritual descendant Spike Lee kept working for years but have fallen out of fashion with the retirement of The Sopranos. In Rob the Mob, they play up the uncertainty within organized crime circles during the John Gotti trial, a time when bosses like Big Al Fiorello (Andy Garcia) warn their subordinates to keep a low profile, lest they bring down upon them the full wrath of the Feds the way the flashy Teflon Don did.

Movie Review: In Secret (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Think The Postman Always Rings Twice in period costume and you'll instantly get what In Secret is all about. It is based on Émile Zola's novel, Thérèse Raquin, a kind of proto-noir. Elizabeth Olsen stars as Thérèse, an illegitimate cousin to the sickly Camille Raquin (Harry Potter's Tom Felton), who earns her keep as his sort of nurse. Camille's overprotective mother, Madame Raquin (played by the 1981 Postman's femme fatale, Jessica Lange) thinks she is doing all a favor by proposing a marriage between the two cousins. But Camille comes up short in the sexual heat department. Enter Laurent (Oscar Isaac), Camille's horny, hunky, childhood pal. It's not hard to figure where this is going from there.

Movie Review: The Monuments Men (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Not long after the start of The Monuments Men, George Clooney's elegiac tribute to the dwindling Greatest Generation, it becomes clear why its release date was changed from 2013's exceptionally busy awards season. Spare, subdued and not the least bit flashy, The Monuments Men is a classically structured World War II drama about a group of middle-aged art historians enlisted by Lt. Frank Stokes (Clooney) to reclaim a fortune in looted art from the Nazis. Adding some urgency to the matter at this stage of the war is Hitler's inevitable defeat and his "Nero Decree" calling for the destruction of all of the Reich's property before the Allies acquire it. As critical as this might sound, the crux of The Monuments Men is whether the destruction of some of the world's greatest works of art justifies even one life lost in preventing it. It's a philosophical dilemma that, by its very nature, makes Clooney's film a contemplative exercise more than a thrilling dramatic one.

The Best Movie of 2013: Inside Llewyn Davis

by Tony Dayoub

As I write this in a coffee shop, the wind chill outside makes it feel a number of degrees below 0°. That's chilly enough to remind me that I still haven't shared my thoughts on my favorite film this year, the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis. A musical that's not a musical, Inside Llewyn Davis is set in the kind-of-blue/kind-of-snowy, early 60s folk scene of Greenwich Village. And its eponymous protagonist is not a character you easily... pardon the pun... warm up to. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a talented singer-songwriter, and we know it not just because of his excellent performance of the traditional "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" that opens the film.

Movie Review: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

When considering all of your viable viewing options at the multiplex tomorrow, it might not occur to you to include The Wolf of Wall Street. But are you sure the cynic in you wouldn't be completely fine with it after spending the next 24 hours wrapping and unwrapping presents, in the company of strangers you just happen to be related to by blood or by marriage, eating and drinking well beyond the point some of us might call excessive? Even the most pious among us will recognize something kind of snarky and subversive about opening this mean, epic paean to greed and the Wall Street mindset on what is the culmination of the most materialistic season of the year.

Movie Review: Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

Sometimes, the cycle of a film's reception seems to run from praise to backlash and back again even before the movie is released. Such is the fate of Saving Mr. Banks, a charmer of a movie that is also a surprisingly well constructed story about Walt Disney's pursuit for the rights to adapt Mary Poppins from her skeptical author, P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson). Unsurprisingly, most of the pushback stems from the rapacious corporatism many accuse the Disney company of in general and its need to buff up their founder's image to get more specific. I point you to a video by author and occasional movie critic Harlan Ellison for that take on the film, because no one can express it quite as well as he does and because I don't necessarily disagree. Let's just say that yes, Saving Mr. Banks is as much a fairy tale as Disney's animated product tends to be. But I still found it to be a moving film worth visiting and revisiting in the future.