Showing posts with label George Clooney. Show all posts

Sunday, September 22, 2024

While Brad Pitt and George Clooney Settle Into Silver-Fox Charm, Their Female Peers Are the True Stars of the Season

Tilda Swinton, Demi Moore, Julia Moore and Nicole KidmanSwinton and Moore: Courtesy Toronto International Film Festival; Moore: Chad Salvador—Variety/Getty Images; Kidman: Niko Tavernise—A24

While Brad Pitt and George Clooney Settle Into Silver-Fox Charm, Their Female Peers Are the True Stars of the Season

BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

20 September 2924

The pleasures of writer-director Jon Watts’ crime caper Wolfs are numerous: George Clooney and Brad Pitt play dueling fixers called in to clean up the accidental death of a young, adorable student—prior to his demise, occasioned by his jumping on a hotel bed, he’d been picked up by high-powered district attorney Amy Ryan in a bar. Clooney and Pitt have reached the age where they know it’s useless to pretend they’re something they’re not. Their faces look handsomely lived in; the whispers of gray in their artfully sculpted chin stubble feel honest and earned. Like Lucy and Ethel in the throes of a falling out, they’re fun to watch as they bicker and crab at one another, leaning heavily on their silver-fox charm. Still, what they’re offering feels as comfy as the worn-in leather jackets they wear. And in this late-2024 movie season, if you find yourself wishing for something more—for another view of what actors in the 50-to-60-ish age bracket can do—look to the women, who insist on pushing themselves out of the comfort zone rather than settling into it.

Demi Moore in Coralie Fargeat’s horror-of-aging black comedy The Substance, Nicole Kidman in Halina Reijn’s May-December sizzler Babygirl,Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s moving and provocative The Room Next Door: These big-name movie stars are pushing into new territory rather than just riffing on whatever may have made them appealing 10, 20, or 30 years ago. That’s a luxury no actress can afford, and these women know it.

John Banville On Marlowe, Quirke — And George Clooney

John Banville
by David Levine

John Banville On Marlowe, Quirke — And George Clooney

Ed Siegel

April 3, 2014

The contrasts in John Banville’s writing are ever intriguing. His novels often have an air of the supernatural in them but are thoroughly grounded in reality. The Quirke crime novels written under the name Benjamin Black resolve who done it, but there’s a lingering question of how much others, beyond the reach of Irish law in the 1950s, have gotten away with.

He wasn’t the most likely crime writer, then, to be selected to write the latest Philip Marlowe novel. The late Robert Parker, who finished a previous Marlowe book, “Poodle Springs,” was closer to Raymond Chandler’s sensibilities than Black, though the book by many accounts was not a success. (I gave up on it.) Black’s contribution, “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” by most accounts, is.

The 10 best films of 2013, joint 3rd / Gravity

The 10 best films of 2013, joint 3rd – Gravity

Sandra Bullock's down-to-Earthiness and some stunning special effects raise Alfonso Cuarón's space thriller above the rest, in our continuing countdown of this year's top 10 films

Andrew Pulver
Tuesday 17 December 2013 15.21 GMT

When Gravity finally dropped at the Venice film festival earlier this year, it answered a question that had been perplexing the film world for quite some time: was this long-in-the-making space thriller going to be a gigantic disaster, a folie de grandeur from fast-talking Mexican writer-director Alfonso Cuarón who, despite his impassioned rhetoric, was not necessarily considered the most reliable reins-holder in town?

Well, within minutes of the lights going down, sighs of relief could be heard all around the auditorium – or perhaps it was the first sobbing gasps of terror as the audience, pinned back in their seats, realised what was in store for the two doughty astronauts, played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, stranded high above Earth. Cuarón, who had been plugging away on the film for several years, and who had opted to develop entirely new lighting and visual effects techniques to convincingly portray the extra-terrestrial settings, was entitled to feel triumphant, and the film's subsequent box-office performance will have more than satisfied his masters.

With the benefit of hindsight, what Cuarón pulled off is properly extraordinary. Spending vast amounts of money on – and perfectly realising – box-fresh documentary-style visuals which put the viewer right up there in the space shuttle alongside astronauts Ryan Stone (Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (Clooney) is the first, and most obviously impressive achievement. Then, to construct a nerve-shredding thriller that – science quibbles aside – refused to adopt any of the standard sci-fi tricks usually employed by space-set films. More than that, to somehow nudge the narrative into an area that – while not quite Kubrickian – allowed for some heavyweight philosophical/spiritual musing on death and rebirth. And finally – to do all this with Sandra Bullock, queen of quirk, in the driving seat. Though she was by no means first choice for the role, Bullock has turned out to be absolutely inspired casting, injecting a quotidian human warmth to the role that, possibly, may have been lacking had Angelina Jolie, the original lead, not jumped ship.

Gravity, if we're being honest, is not perfect: there are one too many clunking narrative nudges, particularly in the fleshing out of Stone's backstory, which are designed no doubt to ease the minds of studio executives anxious the film would not be relatable enough to be a mainstream hit. But no matter: the immersive brilliance of those zero-grav scenes is without equal – certainly this year, and possibly the entire century to date.

THE GUARDIAN