Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Crisp Criticism - "The Accountant", "Hell or High Water", "Elle"

by
Julien Faddoul











The Accountant *

As a math savant works the books for a new client, the Treasury Department closes in on his activities and the body count starts to rise.
An intriguing premise sustains this action/thriller for about half its runtime until it succumbs to ridiculousness, with an endless array of red herrings. Good cast.

d – Gavin O’Connor
w – Bill Dubuque
ph – Seamus McGarvey
pd – Keith P. Cunningham
m – Mark Isham
ed – Richard Pearson
cos – Nancy Steiner

p – Lynette Howell Taylor, Mark Williams

Cast: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, JK Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Tambor, John Lithgow, Jean Smart












Hell or High Water **

A divorced dad and his ex-con brother resort to a desperate scheme in order to save their family's farm in West Texas.
Tautly written and directed neo-western about modern economic hardships. Fairly modest, but done with style and grit.

d – David Mackenzie
w – Taylor Sheridan
ph – Giles Nuttgens
pd – Tom Duffield
m – Nick Cave, Warren Ellis
ed – Jake Roberts
cos – Malgosia Turzanska

p – Peter Berg, Carla Hacken, Sidney Kimmel, Julie Yorn

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham, Dale Dickey, Katy Mixon, Marin Ireland











Elle *

A successful businesswoman gets caught up in a game of cat and mouse as she tracks down the unknown man who raped her.
Fake and unconvincing thriller/character-study/provocation on past trauma, sexual perversion and feminism that is saved from total clumsiness by the indomitability of Huppert’s performance. It plays more like a French bourgeois parody of its director’s previous films.

d – Paul Verhoeven
w – David Birke   (Based on the Novel by Philippe Djian)
ph – Stéphane Fontaine
pd – Laurent Ott
m – Anne Dudley
ed – Job ter Burg
cos – Nathalie Raoul

p – Saïd Ben Saïd, Michel Merkt

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Anne Consigny, Charles Berling, Virginie Efira, Christian Berkel


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