Latest news with #characterstudy
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Mastermind' Review: Josh O'Connor Lands on Kelly Reichardt's Precise Wavelength in an Understated, Funny-Sad Heist Movie Like No Other
Leave it to Kelly Reichardt to make a '70s movie that looks and feels like a lost '70s movie, from its scruffy visual aesthetic to its muted colors, its patient character observation and unhurried pacing to its unstinting investment in an underdog protagonist whose careful planning results in a coup that soon goes south. Josh O'Connor's rumpled appeal makes him an ideal fit for the title role in The Mastermind, a minor-key heist caper that spends as much or more time on the aftermath of the crime, when it morphs gracefully into another of the director's singular character studies of struggling Americans. The film is set in Massachusetts circa 1970, two decades before the infamous art theft at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, whose walls still conserve the empty spaces where stolen paintings by artists including Vermeer, Rembrandt, Manet and Degas once hung. It seems like quintessential Reichardt that James Blaine Mooney (O'Connor) is not going after the Old Masters or anything even close in value. Instead, he targets four paintings by American modernist Arthur Dove, one of the country's pioneering abstract painters — influential but back then not in high demand. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Amrum' Review: Diane Kruger in Fatih Akin's Sentimental Drama Set During the Last Days of Nazi Germany Cannes Gives Warm Welcome to Dardennes and 'Young Mother's Home' 'Resurrection' Review: Director Bi Gan's Beguiling, Beautifully Realized Journey Through the Life, Death and Possible Rebirth of Cinema Reichardt takes her first solo writing credit on this feature, which nonetheless has echoes of two films penned with frequent screenwriting collaborator Jonathan Raymond. It has shades of the meticulous planning of the eco-activists who blow up a hydroelectric dam in Night Moves and continues the vein of subtle humor that made the microcosmic art world view in Showing Up so captivating. The opening sequence follows J.B. as he walks from room to room, studying both the art and the snoozing guard in a fictional museum in Framingham. (Stand-in for the exteriors is the I.M. Pei-designed Cleo Rogers Memorial Library with its massive Henry Moore bronze out front, memorably showcased in the beautiful Kogonada film, Columbus.) One half of a pair of young twins prattles on incessantly about some sci-fi arcana while the boy's bored-looking mother and his quieter brother tune him out. Only once J.B. has opened a display cabinet to pilfer a small artifact and they head for the exit does it become clear that the woman is his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and the kids are his sons, Carl and Tommy (Sterling and Jasper Thompson). Terri appears to be an accomplice while the boys serve as decoys, which initially calls to mind stories of families in petty crime cahoots like Hirokazu Kore-eda's masterpiece, Shoplifters. But that proves to be a bit of crafty misdirection. When James moves beyond small trial runs and prepares to lift the Dove paintings, Terri seems to want to know as little as possible. James puts together a team of three, Guy (Eli Gelb, one of the discoveries of Broadway hit Stereophonics), Larry (Cole Doman) and Ronnie Gibson (Javion Allen), assuring them they will be in and out in eight minutes. James explains that he can't be there while the heist is going down because his face is now too well known to museum staff. But when Larry bails as driver, J.B. has to fill that role, and although they do get the paintings out, things don't entirely go according to plan thanks to Ronnie, who pulls a gun on an art student and gets into a scuffle with a security guard at the exit. Several scenes later, after Ronnie has caused further trouble, J.B. gets a too-late lesson in the mocking words of a savvier thief (Matthew Maher): 'Never work with drug addicts, dealers or wild cards.' Once news of the daring daylight art heist breaks, J.B.'s father, Bill (Bill Camp), a local judge, also has thoughts that might have been more useful before the event: 'It seems inconceivable that these abstract paintings would be worth the trouble.' One of the great contemporary character actors, Camp dials up the pomposity as Judge Mooney muses about the dark market before conceding, 'These things are outside my realm of experience.' Bill's criticism of unemployed James for not making something of his carpentry skills like a small business owner with whom he was at school seem a significant factor in J.B's decision to try making money the easy way. Dishonestly. His mother, Sarah (Hope Davis, sublime), is more indulgent with him, though when he hits her up for a sizeable loan on top of money he already owes her, she insists on a scheduled repayment plan. While Reichardt never pushes for comedy, these fusty parental exchanges are often very funny, as are J.B.'s bad-parenting episodes with the boys. Period production and costume design (by Anthony Gasparro and Amy Roth, respectively) are instantly evocative of the era, while being careful never to distract with conspicuous kitsch. But some relics of the '70s inevitably get laughs — the crank-handle rear window that gives Guy trouble while he's rushing to load the paintings into the back of a stolen station wagon; the forgotten marketing gimmick of L'eggs Pantyhose, sold in plastic egg-shaped packaging, which J.B. provides to his crew to wear as masks. Reichardt finds infectious fascination in some of the more mundane elements of the crime, such as James applying his carpentry know-how to build a tailor-made storage crate for the paintings. That crate then yields physical comedy when he crawls up a ladder to hide it in a hayloft while a pig snorts away in the background, snarfling for food and paying J.B. no attention. Playing a character who might easily be an American cousin to his sad-sack grave robber in La Chimera, O'Connor deftly balances those comic moments with a slow build of melancholy and regret — 'I didn't really think it through,' he says morosely — as J.B.'s get-rich-quick scheme slips out of his reach. Haim, the singer who became a breakout screen star in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, has less to work with as Terri. But she says a lot with her eyes about the character's internal battle between forbearance and walking away to protect herself and the boys from James' wreckage. There seems genuine regret on both sides when James loses Terri as an ally. The economy of Haim's performance is very much in keeping with Reichardt's less-is-more policy with her actors, which applies to the incisive casting even of the smallest roles, with faces that look right at home in the era. There's an interlude both lovely and sad in which James is still at large despite his face being splashed across newspapers. O'Connor strikes poignant notes when J.B. fools himself into thinking he's safe while laying low at the farm of his old friend Fred (indispensable Reichardt regular John Magaro) and his wife Maude (Gaby Hoffmann), who is convinced James is using their old college art professor as his fence. Fred appears quite excited to have a wanted felon in their midst, Maude considerably less so, which hastens J.B.'s departure. Throughout the film, newspaper headlines and snippets of TV contextualize the story against the backdrop of anti-Vietnam demonstrations, colleges retaliating to student campus protests and aggressive policing, along with glimpses of Richard Nixon's crooked grin. While Reichardt is careful not to hammer this element too loudly, it's impossible to miss the parallels with today's political landscape. James' attempted flight to Canada hits a snag during one of those street protests, and the final shot of him, boxed into a small part of the frame, is crushing. Longtime DP collaborator Christopher Blauvelt, who also shot Meek's Cutoff, Night Moves, Certain Women, First Cow and Showing Up for Reichardt, remains a matchless fit for the director's naturalistic minimalism, ensuring that even rows of trees in blazing fall colors are never overly pretty. As she did with Night Moves, Reichardt has made a genre picture that peels away all the usual tropes to focus on character, on human failings and on the reality that even someone from a comfortable middle-class background can be worn down by struggle and reach for unwise solutions. The only major departure for Reichardt is the highly effective use of a score by jazz musician Rob Mazurek. The cool, but also nervy riffs of percussion, bass, brass and drums sound like the work of a beatnik dive bar ensemble winding down at the end of a long set, providing the perfect complement to a decelerated movie that runs on understatement. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘A Poet' Review: A Pathetic Man of Letters Sets the Stage for a Cringe-Inducing Satire of Prestigious Art Spaces
Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) is a bum. Call him a lush, a louse, a putz, a schmuck, a sad-sack, and a dumb-SOB and all would apply. He can take them, and then some. He is, after all, a man of words — poor Oscar's a poet, and woe unto all those who know him. But good news for all those that take in 'A Poet' ('Un Poeta'), director Simón Mesa Soto's immensely appealing and often caustic character study-turned-social-satire premiering out of Cannes' Un Certain Regard sidebar. Put together with impressive efficiency — the film only started shooting in January — this art-world send-up explores the many fears and frustrations the acclaimed director felt in the decade since making the 2014 short film Palme d'Or winner 'Leidi,' channeling them into a darkly-funny burlesque that speaks of verse while playing like a Dan Clowes comic brought to manic life. More from IndieWire Michael Douglas: Silicon Valley Has Made Producers 'Look Like Paupers' Milly Alcock Shares the Advice She Received for Playing Supergirl: 'There Will Be Battle Scars' Oscar's a poet, alright, and not much else. He isn't much of a father to the high-schooler Daniela (Allison Correa), who obviously lives under a different roof; he isn't much of a caregiver to his own aging mama (Margarita Soto), who still supports her failure-to-launch with an allowance and a pair of car-keys; and he isn't even much of an author. Oh he was, of course — winning a number of literary prizes as a precocious youth that now hang on his mantle, alongside a photo of José Asunción Silva, quietly taunting a middle-ager riven with writer's block. It's no wonder why he drinks. And when he gets in the cups, what else can he shout about but 'poeeeeesíííííaa,' stumbling along the back-allies of Medellín and slurring his words, but leaving no doubt as to the passion that animates him. Director Simón Mesa Soto shares in that fervor, mining his main character for pathos, not ridicule, framing Oscar as a true-blue romantic — a kind of holy fool susceptible to even the most obvious of scams but only because this staunch aesthete has devoted all of his attention to verse. And if Oscar's perhaps more guilelessly dogmatic about art-above-all, he's hardly alone in a country that puts writers like José Asunción Silva and Gabriel García Márquez on its currency. Problem is, Oscar doesn't have too many of those pesos. Recognizing that more prosaic reality — while looking to at least buy his way towards his daughter's good graces — our poet soon accepts a teaching gig at a local high-school. There, he meets Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) — a lower, lower-class student with a natural aptitude for… well, take a guess. Any number of discrete films could build from that premise, and 'A Poet' tries quite a few on for size, playing with elements from the inspirational teacher school and the late-coming-age redemption drama before setting into a more sardonic register once the teacher tries to make his student a star. The duo are both aesthetes in a world of opportunists, including but not limited to the 14-year-old's family, who can recognize a meal-ticket when they see one, and to Medellín's literary elite, who see the very same but for much greater sums. If the 39-year-old Soto — who works as a teacher in between films — sees in Oscar a version of his own path that didn't run through Cannes, the director pours just as much of his own experience into Yurlady — a promising talent from a background that lends itself to easy clichés. If she could just prove she's 'serious' by filling her verse with laments about poverty and race, she might even win over a few deep-pocketed European backers. I wonder where Soto came up with that idea. Split into four chapters and filmed on grainy, 16mm stock that leaves a mask of schmutz around the corners of the frame, 'A Poet' loops around questions of art and commerce in an endearingly loopy tone. The film's bawdy sense of humor plays off a non-professional star — himself a full-time teacher from a nearby school — that looks like he was drawn by Robert Crumb and acts the part just as well. While outcast valentines like Owen Kline's 'Funny Pages' and acrid satires like Radu Jude's 'Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn' might serve as stylistic and thematic comparisons, Simón Mesa Soto really owns his own voice, mixing high-art with bad taste to piece apart the mechanisms of a mess-up. Few leave unscathed as the handheld camera whip-pans and fast-zooms between cringe-comedy and genuine pathos and back again — especially once the hapless prof paves his own road to hell with his good intentions. Well, more like self-serving intentions; Oscar might only want to see his young mentee celebrated for her work, though at no point does Yurlady indicate a similar ambition. That we do really feel for Oscar when he inevitably screws himself up and out of a feel-good movie reflects Soto's tonal dexterity. The Colombian filmmaker certainly offers a welcome F-U to World Cinema good manners, but he's not just taking the piss with his tale of a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and no king. 'A Poet' premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. 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New York Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Michael Roemer, Maker of Acclaimed but Little-Seen Films, Dies at 97
Michael Roemer, an independent filmmaker who earned critical praise for his keen understanding of character and his sensitive exploration of relationships in a slender portfolio that included 'Nothing but a Man' and 'The Plot Against Harry,' died on Tuesday at his home in Townshend, Vt. He was 97. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Ruth Sanzari. Mr. Roemer's interest in moviemaking began at Harvard in the late 1940s. In 1939, when he was 11 and living in Berlin, he and his sister had been among thousands of Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany and sent to England. There he would stay — writing plays to improve his English, he said — until he came to the United States in 1945, at the end of World War II. His career as a director began when NBC gave him the opportunity to make 'Cortile Cascino,' a 46-minute documentary about slum life in Palermo, Sicily, that he made with Robert M. Young. It was also the start of a pattern in which his films would all but disappear for decades at a time. 'Cortile Cascino' depicted a Sicilian life so grim that NBC executives balked at putting it on the air. It did not reappear until it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993. Long delay also befell 'Nothing but a Man,' directed by Mr. Roemer and written by him and a frequent collaborator, Robert M. Young. With Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln in central roles, it tells the story of a Black railroad worker married to a preacher's daughter who struggles to maintain his dignity in the segregated Alabama of the early 1960s. Mr. Roemer and Mr. Young traveled through the South interviewing dozens of Black people about segregation's impact. For the actual shooting, however, they used locations in New Jersey, fearing hostility from the Alabama authorities. The movie had a brief theatrical run when it was released in 1964. Many distributors, Mr. Roemer said in a 2024 interview for this obituary, refused to book it in theaters with principally Black audiences. Soon enough, 'Nothing but a Man' was gone. It wasn't until 1993 that it was rereleased, this time to wide acclaim. A year later it was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. In 1969, Mr. Roemer wrote and directed 'The Plot Against Harry,' a comedy about a small-time numbers racketeer (played by Martin Priest) who goes to prison and eventually decides to change his ways and become an upstanding fellow. The only problem was that audiences at private screenings did not laugh. Two decades later, Mr. Roemer decided to make videotape copies of the film for his children. This time, a technician working on the transfer to tape kept laughing as he watched, and the director decided that maybe he had something after all. 'The Plot Against Harry' enjoyed a new life, a theater run and praise. It was nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards. Janet Maslin called it 'a funny, sharply drawn and appealingly modest film' in a 1990 New York Times review. The film critic J. Hoberman described Mr. Roemer in a 2024 interview as 'an empathetic director of actors and an unsentimental humanist, one of the few American filmmakers who shares those qualities with Jean Renoir.' Other works by Mr. Roemer included 'Faces of Israel, 'a short 1967 documentary; 'Dying,' a 1976 documentary about people near the end of life; and 'Vengeance Is Mine' (1984), a scripted film about mothers and daughters, originally titled 'Haunted,' starring Brooke Adams and Trish Van Devere. In 2022, Wesley Morris of The Times called 'Vengeance Is Mine' 'a masterpiece of direction, nothing too flashy but everything true.' Despite being routinely praised by film critics and scholars, Mr. Roemer was well aware that appreciation by a much broader audience eluded him. 'I spent the last 40 years of my life writing scripts not made into movies,' he said in 2024, with a laugh. 'After a while, you kind of take a certain pride in not having been a success. I'm simply not a commercial filmmaker.' Indeed, he said, his most successful work in terms of dollars was 'A Touch of the Times,' an hourlong silent film he made at Harvard. A fantasy about kite-flying, it ran at a movie house in Cambridge, Mass., and earned well more in ticket sales than the $2,300 he had spent making it. 'If I could have made popular films, I would have,' Mr. Roemer told the British newspaper The Guardian in 2023. 'But I believe in something. If I betray it, then I destroy myself.' Michael Roemer was born in Berlin on Jan. 1, 1928, into a family whose shoe business provided a comfortable life. His parents, Gerhardt and Paula (Ettinger) Roemer, divorced when he was an infant, leaving him to be reared mostly by a governess (whom he said he found terrifying). Early on, he said, he came to appreciate life's 'unpredictability.' After moving to England with his younger sister, Marion, in the rescue effort known in German as the Kindertransport, he attended a school whose students were mainly Jewish refugees like him. Once in the United States, he went to Harvard on a scholarship, graduating in 1949 with a bachelor's degree in English. Six years after coming to America, he was reunited with his mother, and a few years after that he met his father, who had begun a new life in England. In 1953, the young filmmaker married Barbara Balze, a schoolteacher. She died in 2007. He is survived by his children, Dr. David Roemer, Ruth Sanzari and Jonathan Roemer, and two grandsons. Soon after college, Mr. Roemer began an eight-year turn as a film editor and production manager for various companies. He then wrote and directed dozens of educational films for the Ford Foundation. Starting in 1966 he taught film theory and practice at Yale, a professorship that lasted until he retired in 2017. 'I was 89 then,' he said. 'I don't think they realized how old I was.' In a sense, he said in 2024, 'nothing happened in my life the way it was supposed to.' His films, though praised, were not slam-bang successes. But failure, he said, reveals character. 'The truth is, failure can be a very honorable thing,' he told The Washington Post in 1990. 'It's not that you have a failure. It's what you do with it.'
