reviews

It’s the feel-good movie of the summer! I haven’t laughed so hard or so long in ages! I still ache from the guffaws that racked my body. Of course, Driven isn’t an intentional comedy, but oh dear gods is it funny.

Cars. Cars cars cars cars. Vroom! Vroom vroom vroom! Crash! Tom and Nicole have sex! Cars cars vroom vroom! Crash! Vroom!

Screenwriter/director Jamie Thraves has made a splash with short films, music videos, and commercials, but his first feature is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect from someone with those credentials: The Low Down is a contemplatively paced film, one that seems to replicate the half-terrified immobility of realizing you’re at a crossroads in life and not knowing which road to take… and maybe even not wanting to make the choice at all.

Inspired by Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge and transfered to the screen by the bleak eye of director Michael Winterbottom, this is a stark and sometimes quietly shocking story of dreams and hopes lost and regained, of the neverending cycle of greed that drives humanity, and the implacable land that molds the very people who wish to mold it.

But it’s clear that director Ted Demme really, really likes Goodfellas. Likes it, but doesn’t understand it, maybe, because Blow fails to do for drug dealers what Goodfellas did for mobsters. Instead of giving us an unvarnished, unsentimental view of a notorious criminal element — one that leaves us free to decide for ourselves how its subject should be viewed — Blow tries to twist us into pitying poor George Jung.

If Hitchcock had made What About Bob?, this engrossing and blackly funny French psychological thriller would be it. Thirtyish Michel (Laurent Lucas: La Nouvelle Eve) is on a car trip with his wife, Claire (Mathilde Seigner), and three preschool daughters when he runs into an old school chum, Harry (Sergi López), in a roadside restroom. … more…

Richard (Peter Sarsgaard: Boys Don’t Cry) is a dorky dot-com millionaire whose days are filled with Doom, day trading, and checking out online dorm cams. Florence (Molly Parker: Sunshine) is a drummer for a rock band by day, a stripper by night. He’s a prototypical geek, all money and no personality, who thinks he can … more…

The Hornblower movies have all been cracking good yarns, pure adventure tales that are viscerally pleasurably in a way that too few movies — even theatrical ones — are lately. But in Retribution we get darker, richer characterizations than ever, which only makes the story all the more thrilling.

I am now in a peevish snit, arms crossed defensively against a movie that has crossed the line from silly if mildly amusing to absurd and ridiculous.