She’s anchored by her mother, a recovering addict on the verge of relapse. Casey, played by Haley Lu Richardson, is a college-age woman full of promise, a lover of architecture who wants to escape Columbus to study it, but feels she can’t. More than mere window dressing, this setting is the essence of the story Columbus tells. It’s a beautiful, placid place, a mecca of modernism arisen seemingly out of nowhere. One of my favorite films of the year so far, the debut of video essayist Kogonada is set in Columbus, Indiana, home to several architectural wonders-among them Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church, with its imposing 192-foot high steeple. What matters is that, when it works, it’s an overwhelming tribute to people, movement, and being young-and to the desperate sense that nothing lasts forever. The movie’s apparently a documentary-it competed in the nonfiction category at Sundance this year-but that could mean anything, really, and I’m not sure exploring the implications of that category will take us anywhere too interesting. Plenty happens, but it all kind of floats by before our eyes, in a leisurely haze. There’s a nostalgia for youth here that, for me, is more memorable than any particular thing that happens. But at its frequent best, All These Sleepless Nights reminds us of what it can feel like for a movie to try to tell the story of a feeling. Plotless and emphatically experiential, the movie has an almost dogged insistence on feeling spontaneous, sometimes to its detriment.Īt its worst, the movie lets Malick’s influence get in the way of it saying or discovering anything on its own terms. It feels like a supercut of passionate memories, accordingly. This is a movie that exists, from moment to moment, in the brief space between sunset and sunrise. They wander from party to party, bump into ex-girlfriends, fuck, do drugs, and dance-most of all, they dance. Krzysztof and Michal are two art students with seemingly all the time in the world to discover themselves, and director Michal Marczak gives them free reign. The wide-eyed, wandering bliss of Terrence Malick meets the cool affectation of European youth in this Polish-language film, set in the clubs and on the streets of Warsaw. If they were, their category would be: “Your Mileage May Vary.” Here’s to taking a risk. As we head into Oscar season-which is overstuffed with movies that ought to be overlooked-these are films that are prone to getting lost in the shuffle of our consideration. What follows are a handful-just a handful!-of some of this year’s most exciting releases-four small and one large, four fiction and one documentary-running the gamut from art house and foreign film to dumb, bloody action. But the main perk of being a critic is shouting out the movies you like and even love, regardless of their potential appeal. It’s no wonder we still coalesce around the usual tentpoles: We can depend on them to be, at minimum, satisfyingly distracting.Įither way, it’s a tough market for originality, and an even tougher market for work that’s challenging. The glut of new content online, in theaters, and on whichever screen functions as your TV, paired with the typical working person’s lack of time and essential hunger for escapism, can make it hard to advocate for anything that feels like a risk. Plenty were also good-but among smaller movies, by the time word travels about what’s “good,” and by the time what’s good is available to the broadest possible audience, there’s a chance we’ve all already moved on to the next “must-watch” thing. Scott told Variety that this was “because of the increasing volume of new films released each year.” In late 2013, Scott tallied up the number of releases the paper reviewed that year: a frightening 900. Just two years ago, The New York Times, which had traditionally reviewed every movie with a New York opening, announced that it could no longer make that guarantee. But it’s also been, for some time, an era of too many movies, and often for some of the same reasons: an influx of original content from platforms like Netflix, a diversifying sense of what “movie” even means, and so on. We think of this as an era of peak TV- and it is. The worst part about reviewing movies is: There are so many movies. More to see means more to recommend, at least in theory. The best thing about reviewing movies is: There are so many movies.
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