Tilda Swinton is captivating as a rock star without a voice in the hedonistic A Bigger Splash
Ripples from the Past
By Tom Meek
In A Bigger Splash, Tilda Swinton delivers a riveting performance despite the fact that she doesn’t get much to say. Her character, Marianne Lane, has just had throat surgery and must, by medical decree, not speak.
To the viewer, it might not register on the first glimpse of Marianne lounging nude by a villa pool, but she’s an arena-filling rock star, world adored and aging gracefully — one dash Marianne Faithful, one part Patti Smith, and a big splash of David Bowie. It’s uncanny too as Swinton, with her ageless elven features, may be the most natural incarnate of the late, beloved rocker.
Accompanying Marianne on her retreat is her younger, doting lover Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts, the brooding Belgian actor inFar From the Madding Crowd and The Danish Girl), who’s more than just a boy toy and man servant. He makes documentary films, which is how the two met. He’s also a recovering alcoholic struggling with addiction. Also dropping by unexpectedly, because these things just happen on remote locations in the middle of the Mediterranean, is Marianne’s ex-lover and producer Harry (Ralph Fiennes) with a nubile young blonde named Penelope (Dakota Johnson) in tow who claims to be the daughter Harry didn’t know he had. She’s the fly in the ointment while Harry’s the life of the party and Paul remains passively discontent while Marianne remains at the center, drinking in the healing merriment. Continue reading
In “The Nice Guys” we’re hanging out in Los Angeles circa 1977 where the neon buzz of “Boogie Nights” is everywhere and the veins of corruption, akin to “L.A. Confidential” and “Chinatown,” run deep. It’s in this tawdry underbelly that Jackson Healy (a paunchy Russell Crowe) makes a living by punching people in the face. Got a stalker? Want them off your back? Give Healy a few bucks and the problem’s solved. Healy would like to be something more than a hatchet but isn’t certain he’s got the goods to cut it as a private detective, though he might make a better one than Holland March (Ryan Gosling), a lush who talks so much he reveals all his cards before the hand’s dealt. To be fair, he’s coping with the loss of his wife and trying to raise a preteen daughter (Angourie Rice, channeling the sass of Jodie Foster and Tatum O’Neal in the 1970s).
If you haven’t experienced the game, wasting away the hours by mindlessly launching flightless birds beak-first at roly-poly laughing green pigs in rickety fortresses, consider yourself lucky. Even if you got caught up in the craze, you probably had no idea why the birds couldn’t fly. The bigger-screen animation, in which flightless avians live on a remote island in a bird-only community, never really answers the question either, but we do gain insight into Red (Jason Sudeikis), the stout ostensible cardinal with Groucho Marx eyebrows and anger issues. The sassy bird, we learn, was an orphan. As a result of his intolerable behavior, Red lands in an anger management school led by a yogini who farts sparkling radiation that can take out a few houses. She’s not the only one with odd talents; there’s a pudgy grouse called Bomb (Danny McBride), who can level a treehouse with his flatulence if riled. It brings a whole new meaning to “Birdie, birdie, in the sky.”
This has ramifications across the Avengers’ alliance. Bucky’s been underground since Cap put him down, but shadowy images show Bucky pulling off an assassination in Africa and there’s something about a 1991 incident for which we keep going back to video footage and getting new insight what happened and how the pebbles of one cold act ripple through time.
For What it's Worth 