I feel very fortunate to have been able to see Tell No One on the big screen on Sunday. It’s a beautifully made, perfectly paced French thriller to get lost in for two hours. Stephen Holden at the New York Times has a review which will just about sum up everything I would have said about it, only he does it better. Here’s a snippet:
In the shortcut language of a movie pitch, Guillaume Canet’s delicious contemporary thriller “Tell No One” is “Vertigo” meets “The Fugitive” by way of “The Big Sleep.” That is meant as high praise.
Yes…. it’s “Conspiracy Theory” minus Mel Gibson’s bovine acting. It’s “Marathon Man” minus the Nazi dentist. Holden goes on:
Watching it is like gorging on a hot- fudge sundae in the good old days when few worried about sugar and fat. There are no bogus geopolitics weighing it down with a spurious relevance. Beautifully written and acted, “Tell No One” is a labyrinth in which to get deliriously lost.
The story, which involves murder and depravity in high places, is so elaborately twisty that about halfway through the movie you stop trying to figure it out and let its polluted waters wash over you, trusting that the denouement will reveal all.
I happened to turn sideways a few times and saw the faces of my fellow movie goers, bathed in the glow of the screen, and every face was transfixed by the magic of the story. Incidentally, the pile-up of vehicles in the car crash scene was too real to have been fully staged. I think I saw a stunt which went horribly wrong …. or did I? This is a movie I would love to own, but seeing it on the big screen is also a must.
enkowntrz
Our last movie was the much touted Werner Herzog film, Encounters at the End of the World. Apart from the photography, it was not that special. At this point in his career Herzog seems to be relying on the reputation which precedes him, and it’s wearing thin in this movie. His basic premise is that “There is a hidden society at the end of the world. One thousand men and women live together under unbelievably close quarters in Antarctica, risking their lives and sanity in search of cutting-edge science.” Yeah, well …. not so much. The people are not that strange, not that interesting, and no amount of heavy duty German accent can make them so. It’s a Discovery Channel production, and I say let it be on TV, where it belongs.
What a festival, though! I look forward to next year already.
downstreamer 