Somewhere buried in Kelly Reichardt‘s slice-of-life film, Certain Women, there’s a unified message of empowerment and alienation. Getting to this message, however, is an excruciating test of one’s patience. This is mostly by design as Reichardt focuses on aesthetics and mood more than the film’s narrative. The first story follows Laura (Laura Dern), a lawyer representing a client (Jared Harris) who insists he’s entitled to a workers’ comp settlement, despite being told repeatedly that he has no case. The shortest, and least developed, story is the second one, which involves a husband and wife (James Le Gros and Michelle Williams) constructing a remote weekend getaway home for their family. And the final story is about a Native American horse rancher (Lily Gladstone) who falls for a young lawyer (Kristen Stewart) teaching night classes, an innocent attraction that turns into blatant stalking.

The source material for Certain Women came from a collection of short stories and the film’s format reflects this directly. While each segment contains well-developed characters in unique circumstances, Reichardt drops us right into the middle of a story that’s already unfolding. Details of how the characters got where they are, or where they are going next, are excluded, a technique that can be frustrating. Shot gorgeously on 16mm, Certain Women is a studious slow burner that should appease fans of the auteur filmmaker while others may be left scratching their heads.

Rating:
6.5/10

The last day of a festival is always bitter, rarely sweet. No matter how exhausted your bones are, or how badly your spine begs for a chiropractor, if the festival was a success you could do it all again for another two weeks. It’s with this dread, and a double shot of espresso to keep the focus, that I entered my last screening; Olivier Assayas’ Clouds Of Sils Maria. The final film shown in competition with a superstar cast of Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, and Chloe Moretz; three women representing three different generations in a story about coming to terms with the past, age, and the consequences of time. Sounds kind of lovely, doesn’t it? Not sure what happened then, because Assayas found a way to drop the ball on this one and produced a lazy, uninspired, and forlorn piece of work.

Maria Enders (Binoche) is a famous stage and film actress who is offered a role for a play she has a deep and personal connection to. The play is about a young seductress called Sigrid who manipulates the older Hanna into a lesbian relationship only to leave her brokenhearted and forgotten by the end. 20 years ago, Maria played Sigrid and immersed herself into the role so much that it mirrored her own personality. Now, after the death of the playwright who wrote the piece, Maria reluctantly accepts the much weaker role of Hanna, but has trouble coming to terms with the way the character is written as it fills her with past memories and present insecurities about her own relevance. With the help of her assistant Valentine (Stewart), she begins to rehearse the role and has slight trepidation and pretentious misgivings with the idea of working with Jo-Anne (Moretz), the 19-year-old Hollywood superstar who has a Lindsay Lohan temperament.

There is so much there to grab on to, it’s a shame Assays butterfingers practically every element of the story. The main conflict, Maria’s relationship with the role, is written with such melodrama that it forces a rather minor performance by one of cinema’s all time greats, Binoche. Her work in English has always been slightly inferior to her French roles, but it just never seems like she gets under the skin of her character and leaves a trail of overacted scenes. Stewart has never been better, and yet she’s still stuck in a stifled shell; even when she’s at her most animated. While Moretz brings in the laughs and proves to be the aspirin for the headache induced by the scenes she’s not in. She, too, has never been better but unfortunately we get much more stifled Stewart than catty Moretz.

The biggest obstacles, however, lie in the execution of the story not the actors who do their very best with what they have. Assayas is squarely to blame for the poorly written dialogue which sounds like it was copy-pasted from some Bold and the Beautiful episode and for montage sequences which make absolutely no contextual sense, only serving to push us away and check our watches. The name of the play is tied into the phenomenon evoked by clouds and wind in the mountains of Sils Maria, where Maria rehearses her part. While the imagery is captivating, and the idea even more so, the meaning behind it is lost in a haze of poorly edited and awkwardly placed images desperate to attach themselves symbolically to characters who are too poorly written to be attached to anything. Not even with the help of 3D glasses would you find three dimensions anywhere in this film.

So, my Cannes festival ends on something of a sour note screening-wise (though, a soon-to-be-published article will show you the high it actually ended on) because Olivier Assayas, usually so on point, missed all his targets with Clouds Of Sils Maria. Fans of Stewart will declare her Best Supporting Actress material mostly because this is her greatest role yet, Moretz surprises in a funny parody of Hollywood celebrities, and Binoche makes you miss Julianne Moore’s batshit crazy and entertaining woman with similar issues in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars. Watch this only if you’re a diehard fan of someone involved, or if you’re interested in seeing what a comic book movie directed by Assayas would look like (a highlight among the weariness.) Otherwise, this thematically redundant and soapy opera full of flat notes is not worth your time.

Originally published on May 24th, 2014 during the Cannes Film Festival.

Like a soaring guitar solo in a mediocre song, Julianne Moore will blow you away in Still Alice, while the rest of the rickety disease movie can barely hold itself together. The movie isn’t a disaster, though; you can’t really divorce Moore’s performance from the rest of the film because the performance intrinsically belongs to the film. But is Moore alone enough to make Still Alice worth watching? The short answer is no, but she does get some help from a young, underrated actress whose effort is just as commendable, but will likely go unnoticed by most. More on that later…

Movies about pressing, important topics like, in this case, Alzheimer’s disease, are fueled by good intentions, though it almost goes without saying that golden statues are always part of the long-term plan as well. Moore’s turn as Alice Howland, a heralded linguistics professor at Colombia who develops a rare case of early-onset Alzheimer’s, is a role every actress in Hollywood would die to play, though few could pull it off as well as Moore does here. But man, is this a dumpy movie. Expect Moore to be showered with praise come Oscar time, and count on Still Alice disappearing into the ether shortly thereafter.

It’s a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions for a woman to have her brain, the very thing she built her long legacy with, deteriorate and slip away at such a young age (50). Moore’s Alice notices small glitches at first: on a routine run around town she suffers a panic attack when, while standing in the middle of the very campus she teaches at, she realizes she has no idea where she is; while giving a lecture she’s given many times before, she loses her place and can’t remember what words come next. She’s got everything to be proud of: a loving family, lots of money, the respect of her colleagues. She’s brilliant, well-liked, and beautiful. But what of that matters when her mind is slipping away by the minute? The irony is just a hair short of ridiculous (writer-director duo Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer’s style is perpetually melodramatic), though the realities of the disease highlighted are sobering to say the least.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, Alice discovers that her condition is hereditary, and there’s a good chance her three children–played by Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, and Hunter Parrish–have inherited the disease themselves. The film focuses on Alice’s relationship with Stewart’s character, Lydia, who’s the least successful of the three kids, as far as Alice is concerned. Lydia wants to be a stage actress, a career choice her mother finds less than ideal, because actresses don’t make a lot of money. (There’s a joke in there somewhere, but it’s not funny.)

Of the three children, Lydia is the one who devotes the most time to caring for her deteriorating mother, despite their contentious relationship. After years of not living up to her mother’s expectations, the tables turn and, as Alice’s need for assistance increases, Lydia’s there to be her rock. Stewart is the young actress I mentioned earlier, and she’s a wonderful screen partner for Moore, much like she is for Juliette Binoche in the upcoming Clouds of Sils Maria. With her signature “bad girl” air and perpetually unimpressed expression, you expect Stewart to be that rebellious child who unleashes years of frustration when Alice’s disappointment becomes too overbearing, but she never becomes that. She remains restrained and wise, and becomes every bit the woman her mother is. When the two meet backstage at one of Lydia’s plays and Alice mistakes her own daughter for a stranger, tears well up in Lydia’s eyes. Instead of breaking down, Stewart conveys the heartbreak in as few moves as possible, never going big. It’s the sign of a great actress.

What makes critiquing this movie so complicated is the disparity between Moore’s performance and her directors’. This movie should be nothing more than a step-by-step, formulaic bore, and in many ways it is, but it’s almost impossible not to be compelled by what Moore does on-screen. She’s a master. Her role is unique in that, while other Oscar-bait-y roles start quiet and build up to a series of loud, bravura scenes at the film’s climax, here Alice’s emotional arc goes up, and then slopes steeply downward: upon being diagnosed her anxiety goes through the roof, but as her mental faculties and memories fade, she becomes more and more emotionally blank.

The key to Moore’s performance lies in her eyes. At the film’s outset, Alice’s eyes look full of big ideas and wit and ambition, but as her mind slips away, her eyes become more confused and vacant. It’s devastating to watch, and the representation of mental decay is beautifully depicted by Moore. The desperation and sorrow is overwhelming as Alice can’t find the bathroom in her own beach house, or introduces herself to her son’s girlfriend twice, or has a breakdown when she can’t find her cell phone. You’re definitely going to cry. There’d be nothing unjust about handing Moore any amount of award statues.

Alice’s biologist husband (a decent Alec Baldwin) is at first in denial about the affliction, but as time marches on and Alice’s condition worsens, his focus shifts to his job. He’s not a louse, or a coward, just a self-absorbed man who isn’t willing to dedicate his life to his ailing wife. Bosworth and Parrish remain mostly in the background, and their characters seem to be there only to provide a stark contrast to Lydia.

Just as it’s hard not to be moved by Moore, it’s hard not to notice how schematic the script is. We’re shoved from moment to moment, each designed specifically to illustrate just how depressing Alice’s condition is without providing much else, dramatically. Despite the title’s message of existential perseverance, Still Alice offers no revelatory perspective on Alice’s condition. Everything that defines her as an individual gets stripped away, and it leaves you feeling empty and sad. Is there anything left of her? That’s a question I wish the filmmakers gave more thought.

Camp X-Ray opens like a tense thriller, with the capture of Ali Amir (Peyman Moaadi) and his transportation to Guantanamo Bay, played out in quick, rapid cuts and an imposing soundtrack. The film may start with intensity but this isn’t the tone of the film overall. Camp X-Ray takes a gentler approach to conveying the horror of the now infamous Guantanamo Bay, than say Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. If Bigelow was focused on the earthquake-like effects of the war on terror, the extreme violence and the desperate hunt for Osama Bin Laden, then director Peter Sattler is much more interested in the aftershocks. Camp X-Ray examines what happens after the terrorists have been captured and are beyond being useful. The film explores what life is like for those who have been forgotten, left to spend the rest of their lives in a detainee camp, and those whose job it is to guard them.

Camp X-Ray follows Private Amy Cole (Kristen Stewart), a new recruit at the camp, who slowly develops a relationship with the enigmatic Ali Amir, a detainee shown in the opening sequence of the film. The development of the relationship between these two characters drives the film forward and is captivating to watch. Fueled by tremendous performances by the film’s two leads. Peyman Moaadi adeptly manages the delicate balance between conveying Ali’s charisma and vulnerability as he strikes up a friendship with Cole (Kristen Stewart) through a series of conversations with her as she patrols the hall outside his cell. Stewart comfortably plays the awkward and distant Cole, who struggles to deal with the social politics between the guards. This is particularly the case concerning her relationship with the overtly masculine Randsell (Lane Garrison), who harbors resentment towards her after she rejects him at a party. Yet as Cole, Stewart also displays a warmness not shown in her earlier films as she opens herself emotionally to Ali and reveals the effect of the job on her conscience.

Ali and Cole’s relationship develops around Ali Amir’s search for the last Harry Potter book within the prison library. The innocent naiveté of the friendship’s beginnings may have been trite in lesser actors’ hands, but here manages to be heartwarming and deeply moving. The surrealist nature of a ‘terrorist’ reading Harry Potter conveys the innate similarities between Ali and Cole, despite the divide between them. These similarities include the fact that both characters are trapped, even if Cole, unlike Ali, has ‘imprisoned’ herself voluntarily within the confines of the camp. Both characters are struggling against the dehumanizing effects of Camp X- Ray; in particular Cole is taken aback with the casual nature with which her contemporaries regularly dismiss the human rights of the detainees.

The relationship between the Cole and Ali is compelling but unfortunately the characters around them aren’t given much depth. This is particularly the case with Randsell, the captain in charge of Cole, who becomes a caricature of the masculine tough army guy. Given Sattler’s surreal juxtaposition between the guards’ lives at the camp and their ordinary life outside, this seems a misstep. A scene portraying the guards forcefully restraining a detainee and leaving him strapped in a chair is saddled next to a scene of the guards partying like teenagers at summer camp. Also baffling is the presentation of Ali as entirely literate and charming, while every other detainee appears wild and uncommunicative. Reducing Cole’s contemporaries to military stereotypes ignores the complexity of the politics that surround Guantanamo Bay. Reducing Ali’s cell mates to vacant, wandering eyed, lunatics, also dilutes some of the impact of the film as an intellectual, political thought-piece, which attempts to offer an insightful examination of the ethical questions that have arisen from America’s response to the 9/11 attacks.

In the end, Camp X-Ray is an exciting debut from Sattler but is much more a showcase for the actors than an astute political observation on the current war on terror.

Having premiered at Cannes over the weekend, the upcoming drama Clouds of Sils Maria has debuted a trailer for the film with an anxious Juliette Binoche, a disaffected Chloë Grace Moretz, and a thong-clad Kristen Stewart. With writer-director Olivier Assayas at the helm, Clouds of Sils Maria takes its name from the breathtaking views from the Alps of Sils Maria, Switzerland (the onetime home of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche), featured in part in this new teaser.

Starring Binoche as an aging starlet at the peak of her fame, asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous, only now in the role of the older woman. Moretz stars as the young actress that’s been cast in the role that made Binoche’s character famous, and Stewart plays Binoche’s assistant in this movie about age, nostalgia, and art imitating life (read our review).

Watch trailer for Clouds of Sils Maria