Guy Pearce

The Shrouds

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Becca moulders in her coffin

The Shrouds looks like the filmic equivalent of David Bowie’s final album, Dark Star, a requiem revisiting old ideas in an up-to-the-minute way. David Cronenberg has not announced that he is dying. But aren’t we all? All the time? It’s the sort of thing Cronenberg has been saying, with a macabre chuckle, since he first announced himself with Shivers 50 years ago. Cronenberg’s own wife died in 2017 and it would be crass to suggest that The Shrouds is really all about that. But let’s be crass for a minute and point out that Vincent Cassel, who plays this film’s dubious hero, has hair like Cronenberg’s. His character dresses like him and works … Read more

The Brutalist

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Close-up of László smoking

The Brutalist did well at the Oscars, winning three (Best Actor, Music, Cinematography) from a total of ten nominations. It is the sort of film the Academy likes – it’s got class written all over it, from the fancy opening credits and the high-end VistaVision process (not used for more than 60 years), to its built-in intermission and tackling of a pertinent issue. To wit: immigrants get the job done, as Lin-Manuel Miranda put it in Hamilton. One immigrant, in this case, an architect who survives the death camps of Europe, arrives in proud and confident America as it’s enjoying its finest flowering and then, through a series of adventures with a moneyed American … Read more

Memory

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A perp is roughed up by Lewis

Memory stars Liam Neeson as a guy with a very particular set of skills… oh, you’ve gone. No, come back. He’s a hitman and it’s a one last job affair and… It doesn’t sound very promising, does it? After all by this point (2022) Neeson has been in how many of these – since Taken reinvigorated his career in 2008 the list contains (at least) Taken 2 and Non-Stop and Taken 3 and Run All Night and The Commuter and Cold Pursuit, all pretty similar. A seemingly average guy at a very particular stage of life turns out to be the sort of man you don’t want to cross. Where Neeson went, an … Read more

The Last Vermeer

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Claes Bang and Vicky Krieps

The Last Vermeer is the true story of Han Van Meegeren, art forger extraordinaire, who knocked out old masters by the likes of Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer, among others, during the Second World War and even managed to sell a “Vermeer” to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring for a fortune. Van Meegeren was initially brought to trial in the Netherlands after the War for having sold Göring what was supposed to be a real Vermeer, as a collaborator who had facilitated the expropriation of the cultural property of the Netherlands. But when he eventually admitted that the picture was fake, those charges were dropped. However, because of the skewed logic of … Read more