“Adolescent screen turns tend to be praised for their precocious hyper-expressivity or youthful dynamism, but Wang Yuwen does something different in An Elephant Sitting Still. In the late Hu Bo’s mammoth undertaking, a darkly poetic and nearly four-hour drama about discontented residents of contemporary China, Wang’s performance is defined by a deadpan, glassy-eyed grimace that covers the actress’ face throughout the majority of her scenes. Wang’s bracing simplicity as Huang Ling, a willfully disobedient schoolgirl, helps ground some of the more sensational elements of Hu’s conception of the character—her binge-drinking mother, her illicit affair with a married high school dean—within the realm of lived experience, as felt but not always as communicated by this recessive personality. An air of forbidding detachment clings to the actress, even when Huang is voraciously gobbling up pastries or a pitifully squashed birthday cake. By refusing to react, Wang cannily plays against the expectations of her character’s arc while providing a running commentary on a particular kind of teenage experience. Maybe one day, Huang will look back on the events portrayed herein with different, more palpable feelings, but for now she can only drift through the motions of an abysmal life she loathes. Blankness is often deemed a demerit in acting, a presumed indication of a performer’s vacuity, yet Wang’s blankness reveals not the absence of thought, but its painful concealment: in a world of so much sadness, what more can the young and isolated do but suppress and subsist? When Huang eventually lashes out at those who have failed to protect her after hours of grim impassivity, it begets a moment of volcanic release that the actress has earned by closely adhering to the state of silent despair that can so easily oppress those unready to fight it.” — Matthew Eng
The 12 Best Female Film Performances of Early 2019
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)
“I sometimes wonder if the inability to find oneself makes one seek oneself in other people, in characters.”
The graceful and masterly chameleon John Cazale, pictured here with Meryl Streep and in three of his greatest roles in The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Dog Day Afternoon, passed away on this day at the age of 42 in 1978.
Cazale only made five movies in his lifetime (all of them Best Picture nominees), but each one is as singular and indelible as the talent of this underappreciated genius who was taken from this world far too soon. ❤️
Happy birthday, Sharon Stone!
“Nothing and nobody else matters in Martin Scorsese’s Casino whenever Sharon Stone’s decadent and devastating Ginger McKenna slinks into a frame. Playing a bona fide hustler unhappily betrothed to De Niro’s smitten casino honcho, Stone is the single most striking element in Scorsese’s fact-based Las Vegas crime saga. The actress can take our breath away just by strolling into a room in a beautifully beaded Bob Mackie gown, but she’s also playing a real, anguishing woman to never less than riveting effect. Stone’s voluptuous emotional shadings make us believe every stage of Ginger’s ever-shifting character, whether it be the scam artist with a criminal knowledge to rival any man’s, the codependent lover, the keyed-up addict, or the materialistic housewife itching to get out of her lavish prison at any cost, even if it means offing her husband/jailor with the help of his equally infatuated best friend. Stone never sands down Ginger’s rough edges and her strident, exceptionally physical blow-ups in the film’s final act conjure an intricate and unabating intensity that some critics like to pretend is the exclusive provenance of men in Scorsese’s movies; they’re wrong, and Stone’s superb and rightfully iconic performance is the enduring proof.” — Matthew Eng
The 10 Best Female Film Performances in Martin Scorsese Films
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)
“Franz Rogowski drifts into Christian Petzold’s Transit like the ghost of a man. As Georg, a desperate refugee posing as a writer to gain Mexican asylum and escape an occupied and increasingly hellish Europe, Rogowski first appears visibly emptied of feeling. Georg is a scarred witness to the atrocities of life during wartime, an enigma defined only by a drive to survive. His clammy body is shifty in its motions, as though not wishing to be noticed; his eyes are vacant, save for the troubled look that emanates in an early, pivotal moment of fight-or-flight calculation. Rogowski serves as the steady center of Petzold’s dystopian drama, and his revelatory performance is a carefully calibrated crescendo in which this blank canvas accrues new marks of affection, wistfulness, and guilt, becoming an ever more layered creation in the process. The actor has been endowed with an unconventionally beautiful face as distinctive and demonstrative as Al Pacino’s, but one that can be easily restricted of its full expressive power depending on who is standing behind the camera. We have seen the brooding hardness in Rogowski’s features before, but Petzold is one of the first directors to showcase its kindness, pleasing not in spite of its bruises but because of them. Petzold’s camera basks in the softness of Rogowski’s emoting visage as Georg lies in the arms of a newfound love or loses himself in the recital of a remembered lullaby from his youth, our dawning recognition of the actor’s capabilities paralleled by our gradual understanding of the character as Georg emerges from his self-preserving state of detachment. It is only fitting that Petzold ends his film with a devastating close-up of Rogowski lit from within by a foolish and impossible hope, his face a worn map eager to be discovered and read by an audience already attuned to its every microscopic movement.” — Matthew Eng
The 12 Best Male Film Performances of Early 2019
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)
“Be conscious of how long the journey is, be patient, push yourself, persevere and always be working on your craft while waiting for your break. That’s what I’m still working on.”
Happy birthday to the astonishing, masterful Mahershala Ali!
“I loved acting, which was never about money, the fame. It was about a search for meaning.”
Happy 87th birthday to the legendary Kim Novak, a wondrous actress who was capable of both deep emotion and hypnotic mystery and remains enshrined in film history forevermore!
“Robert Pattinson’s unflagging dedication to his recent directors, from James Gray to Josh and Benny Safdie to Claire Denis, has resulted in some of the finest screen acting of the decade and performances that are something like acts of immersion. In Denis’ High Life, Pattinson’s physical beauty is an ideal object of scrutiny for a director long fascinated by the ways in which a cinematic body can reveal and refract a lived experience the cinematic possibilities of the human body. As Monty, one of a group of convicts shot into deep space for a doomed mission, Pattinson lends methodical concentration and welcome soulfulness to Denis’ virtuosic foray into the realm of science fiction. For all its shocks and provocations, nothing in High Life haunted me quite as profoundly as the wearied spirit beneath Pattinson’s hard body, a sadness that will not yet allow itself to surrender to death’s oblivion. Psychological portraiture is seldom the focus of Denis’ filmmaking, but Pattinson implies an intricate interior world inflected by the sordid desires and burning, sometimes brutal impulses that Monty refuses to give in to. Although Denis forbids us from seeing all the way inside the character, those intently concentrating on Pattinson are rewarded by his habit of lingering on certain moments, lengthening pauses and prolonging glances to encourage our own exploration into the psyche of this tortured but resolute man, a prisoner in more ways than one.” — Matthew Eng
The 12 Best Male Film Performances of Early 2019
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)
“In the films of her husband and ongoing collaborator Jia Zhangke, Zhao Tao has burrowed into each of her central roles with the prowess of a performer willing to discard any and all traces of herself in the name of her characters. She is that phenomenal being: an actor entirely without vanity. Her performances exist where Jia’s work exists—at the intersection of life and art, a place where the differences between reality and fiction cease to matter. In Ash Is Purest White, Zhao applies her extraordinary, unselfish talent to the transmogrifying arc of Qiao, a gangster’s moll forced to build her life anew after making the ultimate sacrifice for her inamorato. As she did in her previous film with Jia, Mountains May Depart, the actress ages decades across this personal epic, relying not so much on conspicuous cosmetic transformation or surface-bound tics to signal maturation but her unadorned face, which can express anything and everything; here, it manages to contain and communicate a lifetime of anguish and lasting passion. By stripping her style down to the wordless, elemental basics of screen acting, Zhao makes certain that the clarity of Qiao’s emotions and her durable connection to the audience are never diminished. In doing so, she continues to occupy her rightful place as the heart—and breath—of Jia’s lifelike cinema.” — Matthew Eng
The 12 Best Female Film Performances of Early 2019
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)