David Cronenberg
Cronenberg's Ulysses crosses Manhattan, becomes Person 2.0
And yet all along Eric (Robert Pattinson) makes attempts, of varying pathos and absurdity, to break back into his body, and his story. “Look, I’m trying to make contact in the most ordinary ways,” he tells his oddly ubiquitous new bride, an unblinking blonde heiress played by Sarah Gadon. Eric tends to narrate such interactions, giving DeLillo’s habit of ending sentences with flat interrogatives (You smoke since when. You look like what. You do this why.) a purposeful twist: it leaves no room for reply. Pattinson’s alien impassivity belies his character’s hungers; it would appear he is a cipher by nurture, not nature. Even so, actual emotion, when it finally erupts—during the funeral procession for a beloved, “authentic” rapper—appears ridiculous, almost monstrous. More
'A Dangerous Method': A talking cure, conducted by Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender
"You'd think they knew we're on our way, bringing them the plague," Sigmund Freud says dryly to his colleague, Carl Jung, as their boat pulls into New York harbor on the eve of their joint lecture tour. The plague of psychoanalysis thus arrived in America, where it flourishes to this day. More
Welcome to the Unsilly Season! Some important new movies that aren't self-serious Oscar-bait
Now that the summer season, with its obligatory superhero-infested-C.G.I.–3-D-overwhelmed blockbuster juggernaut has passed, it’s time for fall, when things start to get very serious. It’s the pre-Oscar season, and while many Oscar-bait films are dreary, self-serious projects, there are quite a few movies coming out this fall that I, for one, can’t wait to see. More
