Movie Reviews
‘2073’ Review: Samantha Morton Leads Asif Kapadia’s Bold but Bleak Docu-Fiction Hybrid About Future Crisis
![‘2073’ Review: Samantha Morton Leads Asif Kapadia’s Bold but Bleak Docu-Fiction Hybrid About Future Crisis ‘2073’ Review: Samantha Morton Leads Asif Kapadia’s Bold but Bleak Docu-Fiction Hybrid About Future Crisis](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2073-H-2024.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
2073, writer-director Asif Kapadia’s sui generis feature, is nothing if not ambitious. It offers viewers a numbingly bleak vision of the future 51 years from now, illustrated by a fictional framing device starring Samantha Morton, then explains how things got/will get that bad through actual recent archival footage and original interviews with an assortment of thinkers, journalists and activists. By comparison, George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 looks as jolly as a Peppa Pig picture book.
You can’t help but admire Kapadia’s commitment to feel-bad cinema, his refusal to end on any false note of hope. It’s all part of a deliberate strategy, according to an interview in the film’s press notes, to motivate the audience to do something, anything, to stop all this happening. But given how sinister the forces sowing the seeds of our future destruction are — rising autocracy, unregulated technology and looming climate catastrophe — some might wonder if watching this might cause more people to feel even more helpless, freezing them like dodos startled in the glaring lamplight of invading hunters. Those who might be able to put aside despair and absorb this strictly as a work of persuasive rhetoric will be impressed with its intellectual scope, the economy of the storytelling in its fictional narrative, the bravura editing and visual panache as it builds a world full of dust, detritus and debased morals.
2073
The Bottom Line Watch the world burn.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)
Cast: Samantha Morton, Naomi Ackie, Hector Hewer
Director: Asif Kapadia
Screenwriters: Asif Kapadia, Tony Grisoni
1 hour 22 minutes
In the movie’s present, the year 2073, a woman known only as Ghost (Morton) lives deep in the subterranean levels of what was once a shopping mall in or near San Francisco but is now a squatter’s camp. Aboveground, the atmosphere is just about breathable in the arid climate, but surveillance cameras everywhere invigilate everyone’s every move. This is now a police state where people are suddenly “disappeared.” Traumatized by events from her childhood — particularly the disappearance of her own mother, and all the suffering since — Ghost is selectively mute. But her voiceover acts as a guide to recent history as she explores forbidden spots on the surface, like libraries or rooms full of taxidermy and redwood tree trunk slices that visually echo the natural history museum in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a clear touchstone here.
When the film shifts into micro slivers of archival footage (montaged together by editors Chris King and Sylvie Landra) to explain how, for instance, the global rise in autocracies made this future possible, it makes for a somewhat awkward narrational adjustment. Interviewees like Nobel Prize-winning Filipino journalist Maria Ressa or Indian investigative reporter Rana Ayyub speak as if addressing someone just offscreen, Kapadia or a surrogate presumably, as in a more conventional doc. Some contributors are heard only in voiceover, such as pundits Anne Applebaum, George Monbiot and Ben Rhodes, pitching in with pithy observations that barely have a chance to reverberate before we’re on to the next thing.
Whereas many doom-docs of late tend to focus on just one bad thing happening in the world, like the climate crisis (An Inconvenient Truth), the unregulated rise of social media and dodgy but legal tech (The Social Dilemma, The Great Hack), or stupid evil billionaires and AI (acres of YouTube shorts), 2073 tries to pull them all together. It’s hard to argue that these issues aren’t indeed interrelated, but the film never slows down enough to draw out the connections clearly for the slower viewers in the back row. That makes the final triumph of a repressive state apparatus feel as inevitable as the predictable martyrdom of Ghost — a fate foretold in some of the clips spliced in from Morton’s earlier movies, including Minority Report, as if they were part of Ghost’s backstory.
In that latter movie, Morton played a “pre-cog” who could see crimes as yet uncommitted. But as with the prophetic Cassandra of ancient Troy, to see the future is a kind of curse if no one believes what you say. One can only wish that 2073 will at least help a few people reconsider how they vote, how they consume and where it’s all going, but our hopes are thin.
Full credits
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)
Cast: Samantha Morton, Naomi Ackie, Hector Hewer
Production companies: Lafcadia Productions
Director: Asif Kapadia
Screenwriter: Asif Kapadia, Tony Grisoni
Producers: George Chignell, Asif Kapadia
Executive producers: Farhana Bhula, Chris King, Ollie Madden, Dana O’Keefe, Dan O’Meara, Tom Quinn, Emily Sellinger, Eric Sloss, John Sloss, Nicole Stott, Emily Thomas
Director of photography: Bradford Young
Production designer: Robin Brown
Costume designer: Verity May Lane
Editors: Chris King, Sylvie Landra
Music: Antonio Pinto
Casting: Shaheen Baig
Sales: Neon Rated
1 hour 22 minutes
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Movie Reviews
Reagan movie review: A flawed portrayal of the 40th US President | The Express Tribune
![Reagan movie review: A flawed portrayal of the 40th US President | The Express Tribune Reagan movie review: A flawed portrayal of the 40th US President | The Express Tribune](https://i.tribune.com.pk/media/images/Dennis-Quaid-as-Ronald-Regan1725436388-0/Dennis-Quaid-as-Ronald-Regan1725436388-0.png)
Sean McNamara’s “Reagan” biopic, starring Dennis Quaid, has sparked controversy with its distorted historical narrative and lackluster execution. While attempting to portray the iconic president, the film falls short in terms of accuracy and cinematic appeal.
The film’s hagiographic approach to Reagan’s life and achievements raises concerns, omitting crucial historical events and glossing over Reagan’s complex legacy. Critics argue that the movie’s depiction of Reagan as an anti-racist trailblazer is particularly problematic, given his controversial record on civil rights.
The film’s narrative also simplifies complex events such as the Cold War and Reagan’s role in it, failing to acknowledge the contributions of other factors. The insertion of a fictional KGB agent as the narrator further adds to the confusion and misrepresentation of historical events.
Beyond the historical inaccuracies, “Reagan” suffers from poor pacing, questionable artistic choices, and bizarre casting decisions, resulting in a tedious and forgettable cinematic experience.
While the film may appeal to dedicated Reagan supporters, those seeking a historically accurate and nuanced portrayal of the 40th president are likely to be disappointed. “Reagan” serves as a reminder of the delicate balance between historical storytelling and creative license, with the latter overshadowing the former in this instance.
Movie Reviews
Queer: Daniel Craig shines in Luca Guadagnino’s steamy drama
![Queer: Daniel Craig shines in Luca Guadagnino’s steamy drama Queer: Daniel Craig shines in Luca Guadagnino’s steamy drama](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/og_image_scmp_review/public/d8/images/canvas/2024/09/04/85e3813f-0288-4ff7-98b0-3ebe7ce51c3d_91300972.jpg?itok=audBgDzg&v=1725416551)
3/5 stars
American author William Burroughs’ lurid, experimental novels are notoriously difficult to adapt and not exactly conducive to great cinema. David Cronenberg managed it with 1991’s Naked Lunch. Now, Luca Guadagnino takes on Queer, which was written in the early 1950s but was not published until 1985.
Premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, Queer is a faithful, authentic dive into Burroughs’ universe, albeit one that struggles to maintain interest over a protracted 135-minute runtime.
Daniel Craig successfully demolishes his James Bond image as William Lee, a middle-aged homosexual drug addict living in Mexico City, drinking himself into oblivion. That is before he starts injecting drugs and going in search of yage, the plant better known now as ayahuasca, which he believes has telepathic properties.
Early on, Lee has an air of bonhomie about him as he seeks out casual sex with men, but his slide towards addiction becomes Guadagnino’s focus.
Movie Reviews
Wolfs movie review & film summary (2024) | Roger Ebert
![Wolfs movie review & film summary (2024) | Roger Ebert Wolfs movie review & film summary (2024) | Roger Ebert](https://www.rogerebert.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Wolfs-2024-1.jpg)
There are few droll joys in cinema more satisfying than watching and hearing George Clooney and Brad Pitt exchange knowing looks and wry, occasionally pointed banter. They’ve appeared in several films together, but the camaraderie stuff mainly happens in the “Ocean’s” caper films directed by Steven Soderbergh. (In the Coen Brothers’ 2008 “Burn After Reading,” to name one of their other on-screen collaborations, the relationship between their characters does not, spoiler alert, survive their non-introduction.) There are no more such films on anyone’s docket, but “Wolfs,” written and directed by Jon Watts, does, despite its nameless main characters having a largely antagonistic kind of kinship, work hard to give its stars some of that old Danny and Rusty feeling.
Watts deliberately, and almost ceaselessly, plays on these performers’ status as the Last White Male Movie Stars, and even more so as the Last White Aging Male Movie Stars. (Their characters don’t move as quickly as they did when they wore younger men’s clothes, and late in the film they take to sharing an Advil bottle.) Pitt and Clooney play cleaners for hire—not the dry kind but the criminal kind. When an ambitious politico played by Amy Ryan has a luxury hotel assignation that ends with a probable corpse in her hotel room, she phones a contact listed on her device only as a pair of brackets. And then along comes George, black turtleneck sweatered, with a nice leather coat, some latex gloves, and other tools of his trade. But he is followed in short order by a similarly dressed Brad, summoned by the owners of the hotel. And the two soon start low-key bickering about who’s going to do the lion’s share of the cleaning while poor Ryan has to blubber with a bloody blouse for a while.
Despite a spectacular supporting cast that also includes the great Richard Kind, and some voice work by Frances McDormand, “Wolfs” is a duet in cool for its two principals, at least up until the problem they were arguing over the cleaning of proves more animated than had been previously believed. Austin Abrams plays a character known only as “Kid,” and he’s simultaneously terrified and awed by the men who are in charge of his fate. The proceedings are further enlivened by four bricks of heroin-or-something-like-it (some of the more amusing banter has the Wolfs arguing about the possibility of a “magic drug”) and some murderous Albanians who are looking for those bricks. The various plot twists and attempted escapes yield a bravura multi-borough New York chase scene that could have been trimmed by a couple of minutes but definitely represents a coup for the picture’s location coordinator David Fox and his crew, and kudos to them. And while there’s a fair amount of grisly violence here (something Watts is no stranger to; the fact that he directed the trashy, amoral horror film “Clown” gave me some misgivings about this enterprise), it’s more cartoonish than anything else.
This is neither a trifle nor a truly Major Motion Picture; it’s an entertainment maybe in the sense that Graham Greene used the term. But one needn’t be so hifalutin about the matter. Fact is, it’s a smile to hear Clooney utter again the familiar line “What’s the play here?” and Pitt protest, a little later on, “I don’t work that way.” And deep-cut appreciators will appreciate the mini-homage to “Ocean’s” producer Jerry Weintraub in the form of a late-introduced character who’s a Sinatra super fan.
This review was filed from the premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It opens on September 20th.
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