White Noise
What makes a novel “unfilmable”? Often, it’s because it’s simply too large in scope and scale, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which depicts the lives of seven generations of the same family. Or, as with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, it’s too dense and labyrinthian. The more successful attempts, such as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman, have been filmed in multiple parts, while failures like 2017’s The Dark Tower condense the story down to its most basic components, checking off the most salient points (“there was a tower, it was dark”) and nothing more. Continue Reading →
The Pale Blue Eye
Scott Cooper’s sense of place and his sense of dread go hand in hand. He was born in Abingdon, Virginia, a city with a population under 10,000, and the place’s melancholy struck him like lightning. Every one of his films is concerned with the impossibility of calling somewhere home, and he shows that even places meant to hold promise are forbidding and corrupt. From the dying factory town of Out of the Furnace to the blood-soaked frontier in Hostiles to the addiction-ravaged backwoods of Antlers, nothing can make Cooper’s America feel anything but haunted. And that's the case in his latest, The Pale Blue Eye. Continue Reading →
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Watch after1917 (2019), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022),
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Chicago International Film Festival) Continue Reading →