movie review new yorker

‘Tár’: Cate Blanchett’s Staggering Work of Complicated Genius

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

But she needs an image for the cover. Tár’s Mahler run is going to be released as a digital box set by Deutsche-Grammophon, the prestigious label whose album covers are surely among the most iconic, recognizable images in classical music, powerful assertions of musicians — conductors and soloists and small ensembles — as larger-than-life auteurs, with faces and names on par with the legendary composers that they’re playing. The occasion of a career-capping Mahler set calls for a statement piece. Tár’s instinct, in designing that image, is to look to the past. 

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That “maybe” is because Fields has made Tár a somewhat mysterious endeavor. Someone — maybe someones — is working to undo Tár from the inside. We see the computer screen of someone editing Tár’s Wikipedia page, but we don’t know who. A livestream from within Tár’s hotel room in New York is held by an unidentified hand, typing out gibes about the conductor to some equally unknown person. Someone turns on the metronome in Tár’s study one night. Someone else — this time a person we know — sets her loose on a cat and mouse game in an old building complex in Berlin, to horrifying results that may or may not have been intended. At one point, Tár goes on a jog through a park and hears a woman screaming for her life in the distance. She never finds the woman. It’s enough to drive a person mad.

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Why are movie reviews for The New Yorker often honest and critical, but other big publications like the NY Times is often positive or neutral?

The New Yorker is a big publication. Even with huge movies with universal acclaim, I often find that reviewers for the New Yorker are very critical. Not needlessly so, it’s always intelligent and interesting reading, but still critical and even negative.

Why aren’t other big publications, like The NY Times, LA Times, the Washington Post, etc., the same way? Does the New Yorker not have investors and share/stakeholders, whereas the other aforementioned publications do? I’m just trying to understand this. It confuses me.

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Review: new york, new york movingly wrestles with the musical’s legacy.

New York, New York , like most Martin Scorsese films, is about the trials and glories of making art.

With 1977’s New York, New York , director Martin Scorsese took the formulas of classic 1940s and ’50s American movie musicals and infused them with his private obsessions. The film is a fascinating hybrid of vintage and modern aesthetics. Its sets are deliberately artificial, with streets wide enough to serve as readymade stages and cityscapes that are painterly and geometrically perfect. The crowd shots are clearly choreographed, and they’re captured in swooping dolly and tracking shots that are so virtuosic as to be subjects in themselves. Opening on V-J Day, Scorsese immediately mounts an epic blow-out set piece, as Americans celebrate the figurative end of World War II, as the camera takes us from the streets into a vast ballroom overseen by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. For a few minutes, it seems as if Scorsese is going to offer a more or less “straight” cover of the MGM and Warner Bros. musicals that he adores, giving the audience a nostalgic bath.

One element is at odds with these theatrics: the character of Jimmy Doyle, who’s played by Robert De Niro in his alienating ’70s-era weirdo mode. It’s often said that New York, New York is an attempt on Scorsese’s part to bridge fantastic sets and songs with a realistic acting style, but there’s nothing conventionally realistic about most of De Niro’s performances for Scorsese, especially in their collaborations from the ’70s and ’80s. Darting into Scorsese’s intoxicating compositions, Jimmy moves with fervent speed, like Johnny Boy and Travis Bickle before him. Jimmy also has a one-track mind, and his aggressive insatiability for attention, underscored by a loud blue NYC Hawaiian shirt, stokes our unease. A dreamy epic has apparently been rested on the shoulders of a lout, which turns out to only be partially true.

The heroes of so many American musicals—as played by the likes of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, and so on—had aggressive streaks. Those films were often built around elaborate sexual manipulations, but their characters were charmers, testaments to America’s grifting spirit. De Niro doesn’t usually do charm. At this point in his career, the actor was occupied with aggression and masochism above all other human qualities; even in his greatest performances of this era, he essentially acted against himself. (An exception is his weirdly touching rapport with Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver .) As Jimmy initially drives the plot of New York, New York , one can’t entirely tell if the protagonist’s brashness is meant to be endearing, and this leaves a hole in the film’s first half, as we don’t enjoy the central meet cute as we do in even routine musicals. When Jimmy tries to pick up Francine Evans (Liza Minelli), a tension emerges: He’s a creep and she knows it, but he gradually wears her down.

Scorsese is often discussed as a visual maestro, but he’s always loved verbal acrobatics too, especially arias of repetitive, literate absurdism that suggest profane variations of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine. The early portions of New York, New York are often devoted to Jimmy and Francine’s bickering, which is mildly amusing until it grows hostile. This is one ’70s influence on the film, as the emotional violence of the relationship isn’t euphemistic. There’s a relatively lighthearted moment where Jimmy, a jazz pianist, is failing to impress a nightclub manager (Dick Miller). The manager wants something lighter, where Jimmy plays aggressively as an extension of his eager-to-prove-himself personality. Francine steps in and begins to sing with him, softening Jimmy’s playing in the process, which becomes a lovely metaphor for her effect on him and for what she must see in him, in the tradition of many women inexplicably drawn to abusive, self-absorbed men: She has a hero complex.

Watching the first half of New York, New York , it’s easy to understand the film’s reputation as a strange disappointment. It’s perverse to build a glitzy musical on a dysfunctional relationship, and Scorsese’s direction lacks the sprightliness of the movies he’s emulating. He’s as obsessive as De Niro, and he’s striving for a masterpiece, stretching scenes out, trying to unearth shards of emotional truth, all against the glorious old-school backdrops. (A couple of snow vistas are straight of Swing Time and Meet Me in St. Louis .) The disjunction between tone and style engages the intellect rather than the heart, especially as Jimmy and Francine’s relationship is driven to the breaking point by her pregnancy and his drinking and drugging and infidelity.

As Jimmy’s career falters while Francine’s skyrockets, New York, New York achieves an astonishing clarity. What Scorsese is truly striving for is a remake of A Star Is Born , the greatest version of which featured Minelli’s mother, Judy Garland. At first, Minnelli is a poignantly vulnerable foil for De Niro’s thrashing about, but she gradually takes over the narrative, and the film splinters into various cinematic realities. Francine’s ascension as a movie star is dramatized via one long and brilliant sequence, the inter-movie “Happy Endings” number in which she plays a character who mirrors her own rags-to-riches story and own heartbreak over a man who can’t handle it. The sequence fuses multiple songs, multiple dance styles, offering many movies-within-movies to suggest nesting legacies of bullied women who transcended their caddish yet pitiful men. It’s even more powerful for the tonal noodling of the film’s first half, as we needed to feel Francine/Liza’s repression in order to revel in her rebirth.

An auto-critical element inevitably slips into New York, New York , imbuing it with primordial power. The film is less about Jimmy and Francine than Scorsese’s need to work with Minelli and wrestle with the legacies of her parents. (Vincente Minelli, her father, directed Garland in various musicals, including Meet Me in St. Louis .) Scorsese needs to know if he can give Minelli a vehicle worthy of all of them, and this anxiety, this need to prove oneself, is mirrored by Jimmy’s fear of being less of an artist than Francine, which is particularly embodied by an extraordinary moment in which Jimmy leaves Francine and their boy forever in a hospital.

In the “Happy Endings” sequence, Scorsese takes A Star Is Born and crosses it with the free-associational dance scene in Singin’ in the Rain , fashioning a hall of mirrors that reflects female agency and male inadequacy. Scorsese’s films have always had a deep awe and terror of women, and here Scorsese transcends that fear to give Minelli the film she’s earned and the pedestal she has been too often denied. Belting out “New York, New York,” Francine/Liza capture the glories of singing in your own voice, of being allowed to be heard and in believing in what you’re saying, and discovering that your most unlikely fantasies of your talent might be true. But Jimmy co-wrote the song, and so it’s the one child that he and Francine had that he could acknowledge. The song is their merging, their relationship boiled down to its collaborative best. This unwieldy, ultimately quite moving musical epic is essentially about the creation of one song, and the pain that was required to forge it. In other words, New York, New York , like most Scorsese films, is about the trials and glories of making art.

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Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian , The Atlantic , The AV Club , Style Weekly , and other publications.

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Movie Reviews

NEW YORK (OSV News) – Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan can be credited with a certain degree of originality in the crafting of his thriller “Trap.” And, though the film as a whole turns out to be an odd mix of interesting plot twists and yawning improbabilities, there’s little on screen that would bar older teens from reaching into this cinematic grab bag.

Can a brutal serial killer successfully double as a suburban family man? As far as seemingly devoted dad Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is concerned, the answer is yes. Among those buying into his act is his typical-teen daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue).

To reward Riley for an outstanding report card, Cooper brings her to a concert by her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan). As Riley enthuses over the music, Cooper notices that an unusual number of police officers seem to be present at the event.

He eventually discovers that the authorities, led by profiler Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills), had obtained a clue indicating he would be there and now have him completely surrounded. Time for some quick thinking.

Is the idea that a psychopath could carry on healthy loving relationships such as Cooper has with Riley, his wife Rachel (Alison Pill) and his young son Logan (Lochlan Miller) intriguing or merely absurd? Certainly the origin story of Cooper’s madness – he’s haunted by visions of his overbearing mother (Marcia Bennett) — is straight out of Freud’s bargain basement.

So the proceedings come across as more than a bit muddled. And the concert scenes go on too long as well. But the action is restrained, objectionable elements are few and, to the extent that any message is conveyed, it’s that decent people can be almost as resourceful as a homicidal maniac.

The film contains mature themes, brief harsh violence, a few gory images, a couple of instances each of profanity and crass talk, numerous milder oaths and a single rough term. The OSV News classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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New York Stories

“New York Stories” is an anthology — a gathering of short films by Martin Scorsese , Francis Coppola and Woody Allen , all three taking New York City as the backdrop, although the Scorsese and Allen films could have been set in many big cities. Anthologies were popular in the 1940s (“Trio,” “ Quartet “) and in the 1960s (“Boccacio 70,” “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”) but have fallen on hard times recently, perhaps because, in an age of mega productions, the movie industry is not interested in short stories.

Of the three films, the only really successful one is “Life Lessons,” the Scorsese story of a middle-age painter and his young, discontented girlfriend. The Coppola, an updated version of the story of Eloise, the little girl who lived in the Plaza Hotel, is surprisingly thin and unfocused. And the Allen, about a 50-year-old man still dominated by his mother, starts well but then takes a wrong turn about halfway through.

Although Scorsese’s film begins before the director is identified, there’s not a moment’s doubt whose work it is. His restless nature is obvious from the first shots. Nestor Almendros’ camera moves almost unceasingly throughout the film, and most of the cuts are on movement, so that we rarely get the feeling that there is anything still and contented in the soul of his hero.

This is a man named Lionel Dobie ( Nick Nolte ), a large, shaggy painter who works in a loft, weaving back and forth in front of his canvas like a boxer, painting to very loud rock ‘n’ roll. He uses a garbage can lid as a palate, and there is a voluptuous scene in which the camera follows his brush back and forth from paint to canvas.

Dobie lives with a 22-year-old woman ( Rosanna Arquette ), whose bedroom is perched on a balcony below the ceiling. She wants to leave him, and in the long reaches of the night he looks up sometimes at her bedroom window like a middle-age Romeo who has lost his Juliet.

Dobie is verbally clever but emotionally uncertain. In his attempts to keep the woman, he flatters her, makes promises of reform, explains that he can help her career, says he needs her. She has some canvasses of her own around the studio – anemic, unfocused, skeletal figures on muddy backgrounds – and she wants to know if she will ever be any good. But the one compromise Dobie cannot bring himself to make is to lie about the quality of a painting.

The film moves easily in the New York art world of dealers and openings, seeing and being seen. The girl has a crush on a young “performance artist,” and Dobie takes her to his show, which consists of bad stand-up comedy and flashing searchlights in an abandoned subway station. Dobie’s gesture is intended to show he understands her, but in fact he has contempt for the performer (“you sing, you dance, you act – what’s performance art?”). And the girl, uncertain what she wants but certain that she must escape his smothering possessiveness, drifts away.

“Life Lessons” seems the longest of these short films, because it has the greatest density, the most to say. It is not about love. It is about how the girl is first attracted by Dobie’s power, then grows restless because there is no role in it for her, except as cheerleader and sex trophy. It is about how Dobie really does have deep loneliness and need, but that it does not require this woman to satisfy them; he is so needy, any woman will do. The movie never steps wrong until the final scene, which Scorsese continues for just a few lines too many.

Dobie sees another young woman at a party. She admires him. His eyes light up. The scene could have ended there; everything else is where we came in.

Coppola’s “Life Without Zoe,” the middle of the three stories, stars Heather McComb as Zoe, a precocious little rich girl who lives in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and attends a private school where her classmates include not only the richest boy in the world, but alsoseveral of the runners-up. Zoe’s father ( Giancarlo Giannini ) is a famous classical flautist, and her mother ( Talia Shire ) is in the fashion industry.

Neither one is at home much, and Zoe’s best friend is the hotel butler ( Don Novello , in the most engaging performance in the movie).

Coppola’s film is set in the present day, but treats New York as if this were still the 1940s and spoiled little girls in expensive dresses could move easily around the city under the benevolent eyes of doormen and cops. The plot involves some silliness about a missing diamond earring and a birthday party for the rich boy, and Zoe’s indifferent mother ends up as her closest friend, although the movie never explains how or why. The entire sketch seems without purpose, unless it is to show off the elaborate costumes and settings; nothing holds together on an emotional or plot level.

Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks” is the movie his fans have been hoping for, I suppose. It’s his first pure comedy since “ Broadway Danny Rose ” (1984), which will please those who don’t like his serious films, but it is also his weakest film of any sort. The movie stars Allen as a 50-year-old banker whose tiny, indominable mother ( Mae Questel ) dominates his life, embarrassing him by showing his baby pictures to strangers and turning up unannounced at his office.

The banker is engaged to a divorcee with three children ( Mia Farrow ), and this his mother doesn’t understand. One day, under circumstances that would be unfair to reveal, the mother disappears (this disappearance, I might add, is a true comic inspiration – the high point of the film). The banker is at first troubled by her disappearance, but later learns that he can live with it. It’s not as if she got sick or died. She just . . . disappeared.

The movie goes wrong, I think, from the moment the mother returns (once again, I will not reveal the details). If you see the film, ask yourself this question: Knowing what you know of New York, could this mother reappear in this way and be received as the film shows her being received? Allen’s mistake, I think, was to avoid dealing with the actual consequences that would result from such a startling manifestation. The last half of the film sees more odd and off-balance than funny. Perhaps it would have been better to build more satire into the mother’s reappearance, perhaps by having her come back like one of those miraculous holy images people are always seeing in screen doors, snowbanks and the stains on their refrigerator doors.

“New York Stories” consists of three films, one good, one bad, one disappointing. Is it worth seeing because of the fine Scorsese segment and the laughs from Allen? My individual star ratings work out to an over-all average of 2.33 stars, for what that’s worth.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Produced by

• Barbara DeFina
• Barry Malkin
• Thelma Schoonmaker
• Carmine Coppola

Directed by

• Francis Coppola
• Martin Scorsese

Photographed by

• Nestor Almendros
• Vittorio Storaro

From a screenplay by

• Richard Price

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‘Barbie’ Review: Out of the Box and On the Road

She’s in the driver’s seat, headed for uncharted territory (flat feet!). But there are limits to how much dimension even Greta Gerwig can give this branded material.

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By Manohla Dargis

Can a doll with an ingratiating smile, impossible curves and boobs ready for liftoff be a feminist icon? That’s a question that swirls through Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a live-action, you-go-girl fantasia about the world’s most famous doll. For more than half a century, Barbie has been, by turns, celebrated as a font of girlhood pleasure and play, and rebuked as an instrument of toxic gender norms and consumerist ideals of femininity. If Barbie has been a culture-war hot spot for about as long as it’s been on the shelves, it’s because the doll perfectly encapsulates changing ideas about girls and women: our Barbies, ourselves.

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Gerwig carves a comic pathway into these representational thickets partly by means of mythology. In outline, the movie offers a savvy, updated riff on the Greek myth of Pygmalion, which has inspired myriad stories about men and the women they invent. In the original, a male sculptor creates and falls in love with a beautiful statue; in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” and in the Lerner-Loewe musical “My Fair Lady,” she’s a Cockney flower girl. In “Barbie,” by contrast, it’s the imaginations of the girls and women who play with the doll that give it something like life, a fitting shift for a movie that takes sisterhood as a starting point.

These imaginers first and foremost include Gerwig herself. The movie opens with a prelude that parodies the “dawn of man” sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (with girls, not ape-men), and then shifts to Barbie Land, a kaleidoscopic wonderland. There, Gerwig sets the scene and tone with Barbie (Margot Robbie) — who calls herself stereotypical Barbie — soon floating out of her Dreamhouse, as if she were being lifted by a giant invisible hand. It’s a witty auteurist flourish. The Mattel brand looms large here, but Gerwig, whose directorial command is so fluent she seems born to filmmaking, is announcing that she’s in control.

‘Barbie’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Greta gerwig, the co-writer and director of “barbie,” narrates this musical sequence, including ryan gosling’s performance of the song “i’m just ken.”.

“My name is Greta Gerwig, and I am the co-writer and director of ‘Barbie.’” “(SINGING) I’m just Ken. Anywhere else, I’d be a ten.” “The thing that I can say most about this sequence is that this was the thing that I most knew what I wanted it to be, and no one else knew what I wanted it to be. Every time I look at this, it’s just the ridiculousness of how we did it, which is they’re obviously arriving on these pedalos on a beach that has no water. It’s a solid mass with these waves that are sculptures. And I had everyone in this scene pretend to be moving in slow motion except for Ryan, who’s singing. And I think I got four takes into it, and I thought, this just — is this so ridiculous that I’m doing pretend slow motion? But then I thought, I think I just have to commit. Now I’ve done it. There’s nothing else I can do. My stunt coordinator, Roy Taylor, who’s a brilliant, brilliant person, and he worked with my choreographer, Jenny White, because I wanted all the fighting to be somewhere between dancing and a kind of vaudevillian ridiculousness of a Buster Keaton or a Charlie Chaplin. I love that kind of physical comedy. So you see men tangoing in the background in addition to fighting. Because they’re Kens, they’re children. It all sort of goes together.” “Ah!” “Ah! Ah!” “Then we have our Barbies, who are sort of watching with their pink boilersuits, which I think Jacqueline Durran, who is the costume designer, she did the pink boilersuits because I wore boilersuits every day. And she was like, I’ve decided what the Barbies will wear when they’re taking back Barbieland. And I cried when I saw it because I was like, oh, it’s a tribute to me. So much of this sequence is the song that Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt wrote, which was not in the script. But I did ask them because they were writing the song that became Dua Lipa’s ‘Dance the Night.’ I said we need a Ken song, and I think it goes in the battle. And then they wrote this song from the perspective of Ken. And then I said, Ryan, are you up for singing this? And he said yes, ultimately. But initially, I don’t know. I think he was like, you never said anything about this at the beginning. But I think they sent me 30 seconds of an idea for the song, that I just loved. And then I was like, Can you make it 11 minutes long? Because I want it to go through this whole sequence. And then this part, this dream ballet part, Sarah Greenwood, who is a production designer, and Katie Spencer built this stage to echo the dream ballet stage from ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ because I love that movie. And that has one of the best dream ballets of all time because they have a dream ballet that is inside of another dream ballet, which, I think, when people are like, will anyone understand this? I was like, yes. There is a context for this. They’ll grasp it. And every Ken, every Barbie, is a dancer the whole time. And then I chose all the actors, too, because they were good dancers. Jenny White, who was my choreographer, she and I looked at a lot of different musicals, different dream ballets. But Busby Berkeley was a huge reference.” “(SINGING) I’m just Ken. Anywhere else, I’d be a ten.” “I kind of love that ‘we’re putting on a show’ element of this movie, which is very connected to theater and also the pleasure of making something in a childlike way. And we started with dance rehearsals, and I think it was a good way to put everybody in that mindset of it’s not about perfection. It’s about this joy. And they obviously embodied that. In a way, you want the audience to walk out and say, I’d like to go make something. I want to go play. I want to go set something up. I want to do a performance. And that’s how I felt when I watched a lot of movies when I was a kid, or theater. I instantly was like, I’m going to organize my own version of ‘Starlight Express’ right now.” “(SINGING) Nobody else Nobody else I’m just Ken.”

Written by Gerwig and her partner, Noah Baumbach, the movie introduces Barbie on yet another perfect day in Barbie Land, in which dolls played by humans exist in what resembles a toyland gated community. There, framed by a painted mountain range, Barbie and a diverse group of other Barbies rule, living in homes with few exterior walls. With their flat roofs, clean lines and pink décor — a spherical TV, Eero Saarinen-style tulip table and chairs — the overarching look evokes the era when Barbie first hit the market. It’s very Palm Springs circa 1960, an aesthetic that could be called bubble-gum midcentury modern.

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