Julianne Moore

  • Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)

    Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) It’s amusing how horror is the only genre to reliably sustain the anthology format. There’s a good reason for this — horror often works best in small doses, and having shorter stories one after the other can let filmmakers play with one idea at an ideal length, then move on to another. As far as anthology movies go, Tales from the Darkside is in the solid average, although some casting choices may bring it up one notch in some viewers’ esteem. The framing device has to do with a suburban cannibal preparing her meal while the main dish, a paperboy, stalls his cooking by narrating three stories from within his cage —not bad as a setup, but the conclusion seems a bit too convenient without the panache that such a tidy ending would warrant. The first story, “Lot 249,” is probably the most impressive from a casting standpoint, what with the much younger Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore and Christian Slater all backstabbing each other horribly for academic purposes — alas, the narrative is a bit bland once you get over how great Moore looks. “Cat from Hell,” the second story, is far more interesting with its narrative hook, as a hitman is hired by a rich infirm to kill… a cat. A murderous cat, seeking revenge from pharmaceutical animal experimentation. It’s George Romero adapting a Stephen King short story, so it’s no accident if this is the most distinctive story in the film, even as it can’t quite avoid some silliness. Finally, “Lover’s Vow” goes for erotic gore with a story of death and promises between an artist and a mysterious woman. Rae Dawn Chong looks amazing here and the story does feel more violent than the others, making it a definitive climax to the film even if it’s a bit on the longer side. Tales from the Darkside can’t quite escape the uneven nature of horror anthologies, but it’s more interesting and varied than many others, and generally well-executed throughout. The surprising casting does add quite a bit to the final result — especially for those who went on to have long careers during which they visibly aged and developed their own screen persona.

  • The End of the Affair (1999)

    The End of the Affair (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) I was surprised to realize that I’d never seen The End of the Affair — as a multiple Academy Awards nominee during the period where I was actively chronicling the films I saw, I probably gave it a miss considering how little I cared about sordid affair dramas. I still don’t, but at least I can now go half a review without snidely dismissing the film as mushy claptrap. Or, um, maybe not. Directed by Neil Jordan from a Graham Greene novel and featuring no less than Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, it’s not as if you can’t figure out from those four names what kind of film you’re going to get — something well-mannered, languidly paced, well-written but never energetic and almost hermetically consumed with the navel-gazing of two adults behaving badly. The End of the Affair is romantic drama given maximalist treatment with plenty of pauses, delays, torpid pacing and moments meant to evoke erotic tension. It does sort-of-work — There’s a lot more nudity than you’d expect from Moore or Fiennes, and it’s actually quite tasteful in its specific way. It does feel like an inheritor to the doomed-romance British tradition of films like Brief Encounter, and there’s never any doubt that it’s not going to end well. (Especially when the film begins with “This is a diary of hate” from someone who’s not an emo teenager.)  One of the reasons why I’m happier seeing the film now rather than in 1999 is that I’ve grown more sympathetic to the result: it may not be my cup of (intensely simmering) tea, but I can appreciate the maturity of the results, many of the good lines, quite a bit of the restraint in which it’s executed and the overall atmosphere of doomed lovers. The End of the Affair is a very specific kind of film, but it’s not badly executed as those go.

  • Maps to the Stars (2014)

    Maps to the Stars (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) As someone who will systematically watch any movie about movies, it stands to reason that I would eventually make my way to Maps to the Stars, a Hollywood melodrama that, at least at first, appears to be about the dark underbelly of Hollywood. Director David Cronenberg, in the middle of his realistic period, turns his attention to the twisted tale of a burn victim, a screwed-up child actor, a driver, an actress chasing her dead mother, and an abusive help-help guru… plus the ghosts. So many ghosts: roughly a third of the cast is undead, popping up at various times to discuss matters with the living protagonists. It’s weird all right, but in a restrained way that owes more to incoherent melodrama than to fantastic cinema. While Cronenberg can here benefit from a striking cast (including what is, in retrospect, one of the first movies to show that Robert Pattinson would have a better career than being pigeonholed as a teen heartthrob) and a rich subject matter to treat with his usual cynicism, Maps to the Stars ends up being a substantial disappointment. Despite a wild story that eventually ends up in depraved incestuous abusive territory, my own biggest letdown was realizing how little of the story actually had anything to do with Hollywood or the movie industry: with very little retooling, the story could end up being about tech billionaires, oil magnates or Manhattan financiers without losing much of its third act. It’s about the problems of the rich and screwed up, and Hollywood is more an enabler than the main topic of discussion. Even in leaving that aside, Maps to the Stars does suffers from a lack of tonal unity and narrative coherence: the story flutters from one thing to another in a way that has more to do with TV series plotting than a sustained film. Despite the increasing sex and violence, it doesn’t build to a big satisfying narrative finale—although those who had “sex scene between Pattinson and Julianne Moore” on their movie-watching bingo card should be happy. Mia Wasikowska is curiously underutilized despite a potentially rich role, and the use of fantastic plot devices really doesn’t end up meaning much. I still like some of it—it’s rare for a film to commit so fully to tragic melodrama—, but this is really far from being the best movie possible with those elements. In other words—quirky, intriguing but neither successful nor satisfying. I’ve seen worse this week, but there’s a frustrating amount of unrealized potential in Maps to the Stars.

  • Suburbicon (2017)

    Suburbicon (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) The biggest disappointment of Suburbicon is that it features a few things I do like—Matt Damon as a despicable character, suburban satire, George Clooney directing, righteous anti-racism, a Coen Brothers script, dark comedy, Julianne Moore, film noir plotting, and Oscar Isaac—yet still mushes them up into this unsatisfying jumble. It doesn’t take a long time for the film’s audience to start sending distress signals—an opening sequence about suburban racism falls flat so quickly that it portends the film’s inability to bring something interesting to the table, and that the quasi-farcical treatment will not help. The rest of Suburbicon struggles to reach solid ground, as anything interesting is undermined by something worse—the overall tone is so absurdly mean-spirited that the wholesale slaughter of characters at the end of the story isn’t quite as meaningful as it could have been. If, watching the film, you detect a clash of sensibilities at work, don’t necessarily blame the differences between the Coens as screenwriters and Clooney as director—read up on the film’s production history and realize that they ended up combining two very different screenplays in the final script. In the end, the film’s two directions aren’t reconcilable: Sure, you can darkly joke about a suburban murder plot, but you can’t really laugh at a black family being the target of community-organized racism. I suppose that my own perspective as a perpetual suburbanite may be an issue here: I’ve experienced the reality long enough that I’m not happy with cheap shots and I demand something more interesting… and Suburbicon’s middle-of-the-road, confused treatment isn’t enough. What a waste. But Oscar Isaac’s two scenes are pretty good.

  • Nine Months (1995)

    Nine Months (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2020) Writer-director Chris Columbus’ assignment on Nine Months was simple: turn in a slightly hysterical portrayal of a commitment-phobe young man in the process of becoming a father. Whether he succeeded is debatable. There are certainly good arguments in favour: Hugh Grant is in full befuddled floppy-raised butterfly-blinking mode here, almost sending up his own early-career persona. If you care about cutie redheads, there’s a young and soft Julianne Moore, plus Joan Cusack as an unexpected bonus. A strong supporting cast includes Tom Arnold, Jeff Goldblum and Robin Williams doing an Eastern-European shtick. Nine Months is luminously shot in beautiful San Francisco, and has a few amusing comic moments. Alas, it’s not all good, and what’s not good arguably overwhelms the rest. Columbus has significant problems striking an even tone between the universality of its premise and the wild comic extremes of some sequences. Much of the character drama that should emerge organically instead seems contrived through characters who make dumb choices because the script requires it to prolong the tension. Even for comic effects, the protagonist seems remarkably clueless. Suspension of disbelief snaps a few times, whether it’s from perplexing character actions, or even simple physics. (No, you can’t be suddenly hit in the face by a swing you’re casually pushing.) Nine Months tries hard, and probably too hard: it tries to take two directions at once and ends up confused about what it was trying to do.

  • Bel Canto (2018)

    Bel Canto (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) Stockholm syndrome is a terrible thing, especially if you’re not a part of it. In Bel Canto, an American opera soprano is asked to perform at an opulent private residence in South America. But just as she’s performing, a terrorist group swoops onto the estate and take the dignitaries hostage. What follows is a standoff during which captors and their prisoners begin to understand each other. Nice idea, bolstered by capable actors: With Julianne Moore as the singer, Ken Watanabe as a rich industrialist and Christopher Lambert as an ambassador, the film is clearly going for more than a suspense thriller—music is everywhere in the film, and having the singer teach a hostage taker about her craft is meant to show shared humanity between the two groups. Clearly, the point here is to show the growing empathy even as we know that it can’t end well. It’s a laudable goal … and it utterly fails. By the time the brutish government enforcers swooped on the ground of the estate to kill as many terrorists as possible, I was cheering every death, with the added satisfaction that it meant that the film would soon end. Even at a bit more than 90 minutes, Bel Canto feels too slow—obviously, it’s less than a thriller and more of a drama. In the experienced hands of director Paul Weitz, it’s meant to be a prestige production … but that doesn’t save it from ennui, and when it can’t manage to convince its viewers of empathy toward the terrorists, then everything is lost.

  • The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992)

    The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, June 2019) I’m old enough to remember the chatter around The Hand that Rocks the Cradle back in 1992, combined with a mini-spate in home-infiltration thrillers along with Single White Female, and Sliver the following year. Decades later, the effectiveness of the film remains even as it’s easier to see how it blatantly manipulates audiences. The first few minutes of the film, for instance, have everything accompanied by ominous music to underscore that we’re watching a thriller and things are about to get really, really bad. Then the coincidences and vengeful plans and underhanded tactics multiply as our lead couple welcomes into their homes a young woman with very personal reasons to do them harm. Everyone’s upper-middle-class nightmares come true as she worms her way into the family, pits everyone against each other, isolates them from their friends and, in the final act, goes after them with a shovel and murderous intentions. It’s schematic, predictable, blunt and over-the-top and yet, even now, it’s still unnerving and infuriating at once. Rebecca de Mornay is terrifying as the psychopathic antagonist, easily outshining Anabella Sciora for the entire film. Julianne Moore pops up briefly, as does John de Lancie. Director Curtis Hanson doesn’t miss a trick from the thriller genre, which does get slightly annoying in the ending stretch of the film as it becomes a more standard psycho-inside-the-house sequence. The female empowerment message in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (because, of course, it’s got to end with the young wife protagonist taking on the psycho killer—largely useless husband need not apply) is somewhat similar to the spate of home corruption thrillers of the early 1940s (Gaslight, Suspicion, etc.)—the woman is the mistress in her own house, and intruders have no idea who they are messing with.

  • Body of Evidence (1992)

    Body of Evidence (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2019) If you were around at the time, 1992 was peak-Madonna year. Sold to the masses as an aggressive sex goddess, 1992 saw the near-simultaneous release of an album called Erotica, a coffee-table book of nudes called Sex and a ridiculously over-the-top film tilted Body of Evidence perhaps only because the two previous titles were already taken. Aiming for a neo-noir but settling for trashy thriller, this film took place in familiar territory by featuring Willem Dafoe as a lawyer asked to take on the case of a woman (guess who?) accused of murdering her husband. Before the first act is even over, erotic scenes grind the action down to a halt, rudely interrupting a few adults cosplaying noir archetypes and making for a much simpler plot given that the movie would barely make it to feature-film length without the nudity. Despite Madonna being Madonna, I’m not complaining: After all, Julianne Moore and Anne Archer are also involved. (Plus Defoe, playing a suitably slimy lawyer in between numerous trysts.) Body of Evidence is about atmosphere rather than narrative and it features one of the least surprising “not guilty” decisions in a while—after all, we’re in a noir and this is what happens in a noir. The incredibly familiar story is perversely meant to be comforting, as we have a sense that this is just a big game updated to early-1990s aesthetics. I still haven’t decided where I stand about it. Candid depictions of lust have their place in cinema and Hollywood could make a few more movies in that subgenre. On the other hand, Body of Evidence may not be the example to follow. At its best, it’s mildly enjoyable as a trashy thriller blessed with far bigger names than it deserves. At its worst, however, it’s not just boring but actively irritating in how it insists that it’s hot despite often missing the mark. But, hey, surely peak-Madonna was a thing because some people liked it, right?

  • Blindness (2008)

    Blindness (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2018) Some movies celebrate the human spirit, and some movies focus on the innate depravity of people. Guess to which category Blindness belongs to? Here’s a hint: In a universe where a disease is turning everyone blind, government inevitably resorts to concentration camps where the prisoners are left to fend off for themselves. Authoritarian rule quickly follow, along with resources hoarding and mandatory rapes because it’s that kind of story. There’s a voluntary vagueness to the film that is supposed to make it universal but instead comes across as indecisive—coupled with the intentional flight from realism, it does make Blindness a bit of a chore to get through. Once it’s clear that the film has allegorical points to score, it does become obvious in the way it goes to achieve them, and that the characters are mere puppets in that service. Still, those issues are more attributable to the source (Nobel-award-winning José Saramago’s novel) than the film adaptation itself: from a visual standpoint, it is handled with some skill and no one will dare say anything less than favourable about the performances of Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo in the lead roles. A few Canadian icons appear, most notably writer/director Don McKellar (who wrote but did not direct Blindness) in a small role. It’s unusually literary for a post-apocalyptic movie, but that doesn’t necessarily work in the film’s favour: instead, it seems to be pulling back from engaging with macroscopic ideas and locking itself up in its own pocket universe while everything degrades. Blindness is not guaranteed to be a good time for horror or Science Fiction fans.

  • Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

    Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2018) I liked the original Kingsman film, but with a number of significant reservations: writer/director Matthew Vaughn can turn out action set pieces like few others, but his sense of humour is crass, and his fondness for unpleasant gore (matching the source comic) takes away from what would otherwise be a more fun experience. Many of those highs and lows are also on display during Kingsman: The Golden Circle: the visual design (wow, that villain’s lair!), energetic direction and colourful characters are all great good fun … if it wasn’t for such over-the-top gore as many characters being fed through a meat grinder with subsequent cannibalism. Eeew. Or the heave-inducing “plant the tracker” sequence plot-engineered to be as gross as possible. It’s things like that which make it impossible to recommend the film without numerous qualifications, or to justify the acquisition of a Blu-ray edition. Still, at other times this sequel matches or outshines the original. Plot-wise, the film’s mess: predictable set-pieces grind the film to a halt when they’re dull, and speed by when they’re fun. The American Statesmen offer an amusing contrast to the Kingsmen, expanding the madcap world of the original. Protagonist Eggsy is all grown-up, slick and suave, meaning that we get to spend far less time with the chavs and he gets to play the Bond role model he became at the end of the first film. One likable character makes it back to the sequel only long enough to be killed, but on the flip side we’ve got Colin Firth back with charm, Pedro Pascal making a great impression, Julianne Moore chomping on scenery as an unusual villain, no less than Elton John being turned in an action hero, and Halle Berry bringing her best to the screen. Some of the action scenes are fun in more or less exactly the same way as the original: Pseudo one-take action sequences with plenty of speed ramping are once again at the forefront of what the film has to offer in-between needless gore and adolescent tittering. I don’t usually bother with star ratings because they’re overly reductive, but Kingsman: The Golden Circle offers another failure mode for them: When the good stuff in the film is forth four stars out of five and the bad stuff is repellent enough for warrant a sole star, a three-star compromise doesn’t quite seem to accurately present a good idea of the final result. Can Vaughn grow up so that we don’t have to approach his next movies with a ten-foot pole and an apprehensive stance?

  • Assassins (1995)

    Assassins (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, July 2017) The good news are that Assassins is a crazy movie in the best sense of the term: It’s disconnected enough from reality to be enjoyable as a big basket of overdone action sequences and familiar genre elements. The not-so-good news is that it’s not really a good movie—much of the storyline is dull and for a movie involving the Wachowskis and Brian Helgeland, it fails to capitalize on its sizzle factor. Thanks to veteran director Richard Donner, there are some good sequences here and there: the taxicab blocked-by-a-bulletproof-window duel is ingenious in the way more of the movie should have been. Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas ham it up enough as competing assassins. But the best thing about Assassins may be Julianne Moore: For an actress who has such a firmly established persona of mature dignity, it’s a real treat to see her in a pre-stardom role that asks her to be trashy/techno in one sequence, then doe-eyed/cute for the rest of the film. Assassins is also the source of the delightful “Antonio Banderas’s Laptop Reaction”.gif, so there’s a tiny bit of internet meme history along the way. Assassins isn’t a major movie in any way and has already ended up as a footnote in other people’s careers, and it should be approached as such: Not as a movie expected to be good, but a grab bag of things that may be interesting.

  • Carrie (2013)

    Carrie (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2016) The tale of Carrie and its remake is almost identical to the one of every other classic horror film and their remake. The remake is usually faithful to the overall structure of the story, but strips away most of the original’s rougher edges and leaves a shorter, slicker but generally featureless remake. Updating the references usually doesn’t mean much for the overall film (who cares if it’s uploaded to YouTube?), while the overall better technical credentials usually mean a less bumpy viewing experience. Seen back-to-back with the original, this Carrie remake is most notable for considerably speeding up the languid pacing of the original: despite being a minute longer, it often feels more evenly interesting than the original, with fewer digressions and dead moments along the way. (Witness the way two scenes featuring the other girls are combined early on as an illustration of how today’s scripts are far more efficient.) While the film is said to go back to Stephen King’s original novel, there’s no doubt that the original film is the template on which this remake is built. Chloë Grace Moretz isn’t bad as the titular Carrie, while Julianne Moore brings considerable credibility to the mother’s role and Judy Greer gets a more substantial role than usual as the sympathetic gym teacher. Kimberley Pierce’s direction is much flatter than the original, though, which helps this remake rank as technically better but far more forgettable.

  • Still Alice (2014)

    Still Alice (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2016) I watched this film with some reluctance: While Julianne Moore got stellar reviews for her role in this film, seeing a sympathetic character gradually disappear under the progression of Alzheimer’s disease isn’t exactly a cheerful topic for light moviegoing. As Still Alice inevitably walks toward a merciless conclusion, I wondered how it would manage to end gracefully without delving too deep into despair. It’s not an easy movie to watch: From the first moments, Moore’s character is established as someone with everything to lose from early dementia: She’s an intellectual, a mother, a woman who’s lived life fully and has earned her comfort. But when he’s diagnosed with a rare case of early-onset Alzheimer’s, everything gradually slips away, and even her considerable intelligence only hastens the drop-off when it comes. To be fair, Still Alice doesn’t dwell too long in cheap sentimentalism: it lets things play without drawing them out, and is capable of terrifying moments (such as when Alice meticulously prepares a self-destruction plan, to be triggered at a certain level of functional degeneration). Moore is indeed spectacular in the lead role, with surprisingly touching assistance from Alec Baldwin (not playing a complete cad, for once) and Kristen Stewart (making the most out of her limited range). It amounts to an affecting portrait of a mind in free-fall, and the conclusion ends at what’s probably the last graceful moment of Alice’s life, letting the cruel business of physical death as a foregone conclusion. Still Alice feels even more poignant in learning that Richard Glatzer, the co-director of the film, had advanced ALS during its production, and died months after its release. I liked it quite a bit more than I expected, even though I could shake off the emptiness it created for a while.

  • Seventh Son (2014)

    Seventh Son (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2016) As much as I like being surprised by good low-budget films, bad expensive box-office failures have an attraction of their own as well. When it comes to movie-watching, big money is compelling, especially if you can see it on the screen: even when the story is hum-drum and the actors are sleepwalking through the plot, it can be moderately amusing (for schadenfreude-heavy values of “amusing”) to be swept along by what’s made possible by a big-enough budget. So it is that in Seventh Son, we get Jeff Bridges reprising his persona from True Grit and R.I.P.D. (speaking of expensive disappointments…), a curiously alluring Julianne Moore vamping it up as an evil witch, sweeping camera shots, an epic fantasy setting and slick CGI creatures. Unfortunately, we also have to suffer through a dull-as-dirt story, clichés by the barrel, barely repressed misogyny and grotesque secondary characters. Seventh Son is not fun, not thrilling, not even interesting to contemplate on a plot level: it’s far better to watch it for the visuals, the unintended laughter or the way it somehow manages to make its male protagonists exterminate the female antagonists without quite realizing how awfully misogynistic it is. Director Sergei Bodrov does put together a few interesting moments with the means to his disposal—too bad it’s in service of such an easily forgotten result. The decade-long glut of fantasy films lazily adapted from rote source material in an attempt to replicate the success of The Lord of the Rings is not helping the genre gain any ground. In the meantime, we can only watch in amusement and marvel at the colossal waste of money it is.

  • Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)

    Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2013) I like to think that I’ve got a pretty good mental encyclopedia of fantasy movies, but this one had completely eluded me until now: A made-for-HBO film taking place in late-1940s Los Angeles in which magic is real and a gumshoe works at preventing a monstrous apocalypse.  Fred Ward stars as the tough-guy private detective (named Philip Lovecraft, ha), and he gets a few crunchy lines in-between his narration and his one-liners.  Cast a Deadly Spell gamely tries to portray a suddenly-magical Los Angeles and blend it with noir aesthetics, but it’s hampered by a low budget and by a lack of internal consistency: it’s never too clear how magic is supposed to work, as the various fantastical elements blend together in a blur of self-contradictory events.  Still, the film works relatively well as an unassuming hidden gem, and if the final gag can be seen well in advance, it’s still good for a laugh or two.  Director Martin Campbell and femme-fatale Julianne Moore would go on to bigger and better films a few years later.  Cast a Deadly Spell was followed by the barely-related Witch Hunt in 1994.