A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
(USA, 100 min.)
Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour
Starring: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is, without the slightest hint of sarcasm, the Iranian vampire western I’ve ever seen. This feature debut by Ana Lily Amirpour is easily the most badass film of 2014. Girl is wildly original. Girl, like Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, pulses fresh blood into the vampire genre when it long seemed (un)dead following a smorgasbord of derivative exercises in genre. Vampires are indeed cool again whether Tilda Swinton is walking the decrepit ruins of Detroit or the anonymous vampire of Amirpour’s film is roaming the streets of the Iran’s Bad City like the girl with no name.
The girl, rather, trolls around Bad City on a skateboard.
Cloaked in a black hijab, instead of the conventional Dracula cape of the
Halloween costume vampire variety, the girl preys on men who abuse women during
the wee hours of the night. Amirpour displays a masterful hand at both
substance and style as the girl seduces her prey, playing both an agent of
desire and a counterattack to lust, as A
Girl Walks Home Alone at Time plays takes conventional tropes of vampiric
eroticism and reinvents them anew. This rogue avenger administers justice
vigilante style, but she doesn’t really sink her fangs into anyone who doesn’t
have it coming. She’s like Clint Eastwood’s anonymous gunslinger from the
spaghetti western days, administering street justice with calculated force, and
the electrifying score invites direct comparison to the Ennio Morricone and the
westerns of Sergio Leone. The moody, atmospheric black-and-white cinematography
by Lyle Vincent, on the other hand, creates a gothic surrealism that one hasn’t
seen before—especially in such a banal suburban environment. This wild fusion
of genre is one of the most exciting and original films of the year.
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Double
(UK, 93 min.)
Dir. Richard Ayoade, Writ. Richard Ayoade, Avi Korine
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska
Richard Ayoade’s The
Double is another dark and moody entry in the screener pile, but this one mostly
plays like art for art’s sake. The tonally uneven The Double adapts a novella by Dostoevsky with a quasi-comic fizzle
as Jesse Eisenberg confronts Jesse Eisenberg in a doppelgänger pic about the banality
of bureaucracy and the crippling ineptness it breeds. Eisenberg is at his
unlikable best in a dual role while Mia Wasikowska steals every scene as the
woman caught between the ego and the id. The film clearly owes a debt to Orson
Welles’s adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial
with how Ayoade envisions a quirky future where busybodies do office work like
drones, but the film makes its point relatively early and dabbles in a
psychological mind game that offers little payoff. The Double nearly succeeds on its ambition alone, though, as far as
offbeat takes on Russian lit go. It’s an atmospheric slice of black comedy with
a speculative twist, but interested parties should probably rent Denis
Villeneuve’s Enemy instead.
Rating: ★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
The Double is now available on home video.
Frank
(UK/Ireland/USA, 95 min.)
Dir. Lenny Abrahamson, Writ. Jon Ronson, Peter Straughan Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Michael Fassbender, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Scoot McNairy
Frank reeks of
hipster as Domhnall Gleeson’s aspiring songwriter Jon gets a gig with a band
and tries to usher them into some social media phenomenon with their idiosyncratic
and noncommercial music. The problem with Frank,
though, is that everyone in the film hovers around Frank as if he’s some divine
prophet or the next John Lennon, but Frank isn’t remotely interesting and his
music, frankly, stinks. The film aspires to be a commentary on cultural
innovation and a celebration of misfits, but the ruse of Frank’s giant head
completely wastes Fassbender’s talent while Gleeson, who was so effective in Anna Karenina, struggles to carry the
film and rivals Frank’s painted face for limited dramatic range. Frank might have been a great short, but
it’s good for exactly one chuckle, and that’s about it.
Rating: ★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Other additions to
the screener pile include the reviewed-in-length The Homesman, plus some of the year’s best films, Wild, Birdman, A Most Wanted Man,
and Actress. More to come!
