Oren Moverman
Occupation
Filmmaker
Time Out Of Mind Trailer
George is a man whose life has turned upside down. With no possessions and no home, George lives on the streets of New York. His only family is his estranged daughter. Left with no other choice, George seeks sanctuary from the elements at Bellevue Hospital. Surrounded by other men all in similar situations to himself - and often much worse, there's little respite.
Living in squalid conditions, the only good thing that seems to be happening to George is he finds friendship with a fellow resident, Dixon. With a little help, George begins to get his life - or at least his mental state - back on track all part of a long process to mend his fractured relationship with his daughter.
Time Out Of Mind stars Richard Gere in an almost unrecognisable role. Gere recently admitted that when he was shooting scenes for the movie out on the streets, only two people recognised him and left him feeling invisible. He has since met with NYC Mayor to speak about the homeless problem the city faces.
Continue: Time Out Of Mind Trailer
Love & Mercy Review
Extraordinary
An unusually inventive approach brings this story to life, as the filmmakers get into the mind of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson to reveal how he created those unforgettable songs. Even more impressive is the depiction of Wilson's troubled personal life, which plays out with an unnerving resonance rarely matched by rock-star biopics. This is due to artful direction and writing plus committed performances from Paul Dano and John Cusack, who play Wilson at two key points in his life.
As a young man in the 1960s, Brian Wilson (Dano) is a prodigious genius, preferring to stay in the studio while his brothers Dennis and Carl (Kenny Wormald and Brett Davern) and their bandmate Mike Love (Jake Abel) head out to meet girls on tour. They don't understand Brian's obsession with oddball sounds, but let him do his thing until it becomes clear that he's mentally unstable. Years later, in the late 1980s, Brian (now Cusack) falls for Cadillac saleswoman Melinda (Elizabeth Banks), who realises that he is being over-medicated and possibly abused by his controlling psychiatrist guardian Eugene (Paul Giamatti). And instead of leaving, as Eugene orders her to do, she fights for Brian.
These two time periods are interwoven together in a strikingly seamless way, shifting back and forth to build a potent dramatic and emotional momentum. By seeing everything from Wilson's perspective, the filmmakers are able to take the audience on a remarkable journey through his life, avoiding the usual predictable formula. Wilson's life may follow the usual trajectory of success followed by drug abuse, but his mental illness adds an involving angle that's depicted with sensitivity by Dano and Cusack, as well as director Bill Pohlad and writers Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner. Even more impressive is Banks' performance, which is the key that takes us right into the story. It's a beautifully textured turn that reminds us that she can do a lot more than steal movies in comical roles (see Pitch Perfect, Magic Mike and The Hunger Games).
Continue reading: Love & Mercy Review
Brian Wilson's Troubled Life Story Hits The Big Screen In Bill Pohlad's 'Love & Mercy' [Trailer]
By Holly Williams in Movies / TV / Theatre on 04 March 2015
The Beach Boys songwriter is portrayed by Paul Dano and John Cusack in this moving biopic.
The full story of The Beach Boys legend Brian Wilson is finally hitting the movies in the form of Bill Pohlad's challenging, life-spanning biopic 'Love & Mercy' which stars Paul Dano and John Cusack as the respective younger and older Wilsons.
While being responsible for writing one of the most important rock albums in history, 1966's 'Pet Sounds', Brian Wilson was at the most fragile stage of his life during that decade. Dragged down mentally and emotionally by the stress of song-writing he took comfort in drug use and was subsequently forced to seek a range of psychological treatments. As tensions within the band grew, he became more and more erratic and lost in a confusing world of hallucinations and psychosis. Paul Dano plays Wilson's enthusiastic younger self, while John Cusack takes on the role of the broken man that came decades after. Paul Giamatti also makes an appearance as Wilson's crooked psychologist Eugene Landy who fed him excessively high dosages of medicative drugs and prevented him from seeing his partner Melinda Ledbetter (who is played by Elizabeth Banks).
Continue reading: Brian Wilson's Troubled Life Story Hits The Big Screen In Bill Pohlad's 'Love & Mercy' [Trailer]
Rampart Review
By Rich Cline
Good
Harrelson reunites with The Messenger writer-director Moverman for this grim drama about police corruption in late-1990s Los Angeles. But while it's sharply well-made, the film doesn't really offer anything new to the bad-cop genre.
Dave (Harrelson) is struggling to hold his fractured family together while covering up his dodgy activities as a cop in L.A.'s rough Rampart district. He lives with his two ex-wives (Heche and Nixon) and two daughters (Larson and Boyarsky), while developing a tentative relationship with a lawyer (Wright).
But his vigilante-style approach to his job leaves him with few friends, while his addiction to prescription drugs is sending him into a downward spiral. And now he's being harassed by the D.A. (Weaver) and her investigator (Ice Cube).
Continue reading: Rampart Review
Rampart Trailer
In the midst of the 1990's Rampart Scandal, Dave Brown works for the LAPD and is the most corrupt cop you're ever likely to meet. He is racist, homophobic and chauvinistic and that's just the tip of the iceberg. In his mind, he thinks he is an action hero and he has dedicated himself to doing 'the people's dirty work'. In his personal life, he has two ex-wives - both of them sisters - and has fathered two daughters between them.
Continue: Rampart Trailer
The Messenger Trailer
Watch the trailer for The Messenger
Continue: The Messenger Trailer
I'm Not There Review
By Chris Cabin
Essential
We first meet the real Bob Dylan, lit by a spotlight and blowing into a harmonica with his eyes turned ever-downward, at the very end of Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. (The footage comes from a concert filmed in the 1960's.) Though there are six evocations of our hero's persona and dozens of references to his words and images, his actual visage is kept under lock and key until the solemn credits. To Haynes, the mystery of who the man is behind closed doors should stay that way: Behind closed doors tends to be pretty tedious if not downright boring. It's more fun to extrapolate: In the open valleys of cultural myth, a celebrity can become any number of things.
At first, he's a young, train-hopping wanderer who has taken the name Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), from his hero Woody Guthrie. He also plays a guitar with "This Machine Kills Fascism" painted on it. Later, the man appears as an aged Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) who can't understand why the locals are being bullied out of their land by a decrepit Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood). Fitfully, the sequences are shot in the dusty browns of Peckinpah and the hippie westerns of the late 1960s and 1970s. Both stories, along with the others, are consistently interrupted by a press conference with poet Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), who speaks in a particularly American sarcasm while scrutinizing everyone who questions him, half-mumbling with cigarette in hand.
Continue reading: I'm Not There Review