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All articles by Daniel Montgomery
14 May 2012
I've long been a subscriber to Alfred Hitchcock's Bomb Theory, and have referenced it often. It is how the director explained his philosophy on suspense: "We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, 'Boom!' There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise,...
29 February 2012
I love knowledge and thus have a great admiration for journalism, which at its best is the immune system of a free society. Its purpose it not only to pass along information but to verify it, filter it, and deliver it in its purest form. I was surprised when I read a recent opinion piece – from the New York Times, no less – questioning, and I quote, "whether and when New York Times news reporters...
23 February 2012
I discovered the "Paradise Lost" films three years ago and was mesmerized. Taken together, the first two installments, "The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" and "Revelations," are an extraordinary document of an American injustice. I rented them in 2009, sixteen years after three Arkansas teens were convicted of grisly child murders and more than two years before the state finally relented and...
08 February 2012
Albert Nobbs is a pretty good film that would have been better if it had gotten rid of the exposition. I say that often, but this is a unique case in which the exposition not only gets in the way but makes the characters less clear. This is the labor of love of actress Glenn Close, who plays the title character and also co-wrote the screenplay and penned the song "Lay Your Head Down" for the...
11 January 2012
"War Horse" feels like Steven Spielberg trying on a nice-looking pair of shoes that don't quite fit him; he walks with an awkward, uneven gait (unlike the steady confidence of his "Adventures of Tintin," which was released on the same weekend in the US). I could sense him affecting a style not entirely his own, channeling an old-fashioned sentimentality. Make no mistake, Spielberg has his own...
19 December 2011
There's no reason "Trust" shouldn't work. It stars Clive Owen and Catherine Keener in strong performances as Will and Lynn, parents whose fourteen-year-old daughter, Annie, is seduced online by an adult predator and subsequently raped. Annie is played by Liana Liberato in a committed, psychologically complex turn. The film's problem is that it doesn't follow suit. In approaching a difficult...
24 November 2011
Andrea Dunbar was a playwright who grew up in a poor housing estate in Yorkshire, England. She wrote the autobiographical play "The Arbor" about her contentious family life and abusive marriage to a Pakistani man. Clio Barnard's stirring, innovative documentary of the same name is ostensibly about Andrea, but more than that it's about her legacy, about the children she left behind when she...
12 November 2011
Hunger was the feature directing debut of Steve McQueen, a multimedia artist whose work has appeared in art galleries. One of those gallery-exhibited films, titled "Bear," is described by Wikipedia as follows: "two naked men (one of them McQueen) exchange a series of glances which might be taken to be flirtatious or threatening." Given his avant-garde origins, it's not surprising his first foray...
12 October 2011
"In a Better World," this year's Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Language Film, begins with a compelling moral question but then slides into "Afterschool Special" territory. It opens with Anton (Mikael Persbrandt), a Swedish doctor volunteering in Africa, while his estranged wife Marianne (Trine Dyrholm) and his son Elias (Markus Rygaard) cope with his absence at home in Denmark. Meanwhile, another...
17 September 2011
Lee Chang-dong directs "Poetry" with such subtlety and grace that you might not notice it was directed at all, and in this case I mean that as a compliment. There's no musical score, and he films with unfussy static shots and pans whose simplicity belies their frequent beauty. The story seems just to unfold, captured spontaneously by a camera that watches the action and somehow conveys the...
09 August 2011
Omkara is a modern retelling of Shakespeare's Othello where all the pieces fall into place more or less on cue: the powerful title character (Ajay Devgan), his loyal second-in-command, Langda (Saif Ali Khan), and the inexperienced Kesu (Vivek Oberoi), whom Omkara promotes to a key position instead of Langda, leading to jealousy and tragedy. An innocent victim of these machinations is Dolly (...
04 August 2011
Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which has earned the director his best reviews in years, premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was the opening night selection, and what an appropriate selection it was. It's not set in any real Paris but in a Paris of the imagination, a romantic retreat of art and culture and history, filtered through the wide-eyed nostalgia of an American writer...
25 June 2011
Heavenly Creatures is a film that succeeds because of how well it immerses us in the world its characters live in. Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet (Kate Winslet) are adolescent girls who meet at school in 1950s New Zealand and develop a mutually dependent bond that concerns their respective parents. Pauline is sullen, keeps her head down, seems to be a good student but is alienated from...
03 June 2011
Over the course of just two novels, I've developed a love-hate relationship with Jonathan Safran Foer, and after reading his "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," I understand that he has a certain style that alternates between beautiful prose and extreme pretension. There's no mistaking this for the work of anyone but the author of "Everything is Illuminated," and I mean that in a good way and...
12 May 2011
Win Win is a well-meaning drama that strains under the weight of a plot contrivance. This is somewhat disappointing because its writer-director is Thomas McCarthy, who previously made The Visitor, a much less formulaic movie, about a lonely professor who bonds with immigrants living in his New York City apartment. That film started and ended with character. This one begins with the introduction...
24 April 2011
Watching The Double Life of Veronique is like trying to read a map without a key. The audio commentary by Annette Insdorf – who authored Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski and appeared in featurettes on each of the Three Colors DVDs – clarifies a few elusive story details, but mostly she clarifies my frustration, which makes me glad I watched the film again,...
23 March 2011
Some weeks ago I listened to an eye-opening podcast of This American Life that explained economics with a startling revelation: money isn't real. Though I'm oversimplifying a complex issue, the value of money is, in a sense, a lie agreed upon ever since the US left the gold standard. That's why consumer confidence is so important to a functioning economy – when you exchange a dollar for goods or...
16 March 2011
The challenge of Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, is that it's really several stories in one: (1) the story of the unchecked corruption of the financial industry and how Eliot Spitzer, as New York attorney general and then governor, tried to rein it in, (2) the story of a hot-tempered New York attorney general and governor foolish enough to hire prostitutes while building a...
20 February 2011
Prolonged exposure to Enter the Void may cause seizures. It’s possible that director Gaspar Noé is actively trying to cause seizures. He drifts his camera into light sources like a moth to a flame, filling the entire frame with pulsating light. Many other scenes take place in nightclubs with flashing displays, and the film flies us over Tokyos both real and imagined, their neon kaleidoscope signs...
06 February 2011
Of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors films, Red is the most elusive. It escaped my grasp, ducking around the corners of disconnected plot details and leading us down a diversionary parallel story that finally dovetails in a twist of fate that — is it fate at all? And if so, what is so fated about it? It’s a cosmic coincidence, delivered with a transfixing sense of import. And yet this is also...
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