(Le moine, 2011) German-French director Dominik Moll’s been away from the art cinema for a long while and returns with “The Monk,” a vivid, lush, fevered sex-and-madness kitchen sink of a semi-supernatural movie that seems determined from every corner to make up for lost time and centuries of Catholic guilt. Vincent Cassel plays a seventeenth-century Spanish monk whose life began as a foundling on the Capuchin monastery steps, after which the friars raise him. After a career as a fiery, proud cleric, the path of righteousness leads, as it will, to temptation and extravagant depictions of sexual sin. Surrealism, sadly, does not take the head seat at the table—Buñuel and his screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrièreworked on a version of the source material for a bit—and while the material cries out for a more brute, baroque punch to its Gothic strokes, other visual pleasures await, including the stark Catalan landscape, eye-opening nighttime processions, and eventually, a willingness to leap into the narrative void into crackpot climaxes. Based upon a once-banned 1796 novel. With Geraldine Chaplin, Deborah Francois, Josephine Japy, Sergi Lopez. 101m. (Ray Pride)
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
Seeing The Elephant: A Review Of Babylon The boisterous, brawling yet melancholy "Babylon," is a variation on film history, but more drawing for drama. It's gaudy and mean, celebratory and sorrowful.
Heart: A Review of Soul The real world is soulful, too, in Pixar's bountiful life of the mind.
Heart of Darkness: A Review of The Batman The three-hour film noir unfolds briskly, an intensive study in the pervasive interplay of power, money and corruption in what seems like perpetual rainy night.
Uncanny Ally: A Review Of M3GAN "M3GAN" sells itself in its first handful of seconds in how it introduces the handiwork of roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams, "Get Out") and her present product, PurrPetual Petz from Funki.
(Le moine, 2011) German-French director Dominik Moll’s been away from the art cinema for a long while and returns with “The Monk,” a vivid, lush, fevered sex-and-madness kitchen sink of a semi-supernatural movie that seems determined from every corner to make up for lost time and centuries of Catholic guilt. Vincent Cassel plays a seventeenth-century Spanish monk whose life began as a foundling on the Capuchin monastery steps, after which the friars raise him. After a career as a fiery, proud cleric, the path of righteousness leads, as it will, to temptation and extravagant depictions of sexual sin. Surrealism, sadly, does not take the head seat at the table—Buñuel and his screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière worked on a version of the source material for a bit—and while the material cries out for a more brute, baroque punch to its Gothic strokes, other visual pleasures await, including the stark Catalan landscape, eye-opening nighttime processions, and eventually, a willingness to leap into the narrative void into crackpot climaxes. Based upon a once-banned 1796 novel. With Geraldine Chaplin, Deborah Francois, Josephine Japy, Sergi Lopez. 101m. (Ray Pride)
