Skip to main content

Out of Blue review – Carol Morley’s visionary thriller

Patricia Clarkson’s homicide cop is the enigma in the director’s inspired reworking of a Martin Amis crime novel

Is there any voice in modern British cinema more singular or distinctive than that of Carol Morley? From the confessional revelations of The Alcohol Years, through the heart-breaking docudrama of Dreams of a Life, to the spine-tingling swoon of The Falling, Morley has proved herself an unflinchingly adventurous film-maker – what Werner Herzog would call “a good soldier for cinema”. In her latest film, her most ambitious to date, she takes a neo-noir murder mystery and turns it into a quasi-metaphysical rumination upon life, the universe and everything. It’s a feat she undertakes with the gusto of one who is unafraid to fall, conjuring a trail of iridescent movie magic as she sets her sights on the stars.

“You can tell a lot by looking,” says astrophysicist Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer), a phrase that reverberates throughout this shimmering puzzle, matched and mirrored by the haunting strains of Brenda Lee singing I’ll Be Seeing You. After a cosmic opening that recalls Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, we pan down to Earth, to the blue dome of an observatory split by a shaft of red light.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2CK5QQo
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more