
Victoria
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
As a piece of social satire, Knock Knock winds up being not just toothless but anticlimactic.
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a…
A NYFF report on Don Cheadle's directorial debut, "Miles Ahead."
A NYFF report on "Carol," "The Assassin" and "Right Now, Wrong Then."
An interview with Joshua Abrams, composer of "Life Itself."
A report about Chaz Ebert's upcoming appearance on OWN's "Where Are They Now?" program.
A FFC review of "The Look of Silence."
A review of "A Girl at My Door".
On the set of "The Knick"; Swedish cinema gives women a bigger role; When Amazon dies; Stories of "Star Wars" extras; Chatting with Abi Morgan.
Eight films to check out before Guillermo Del Toro's "Crimson Peak" comes out Friday.
When I was a kid I saw both David Lean's "Oliver Twist" and Carol Reed's
"Oliver!," and then promptly spent a summer plowing my way through
Dickens' book, which I hadn't read, hoping to step into the fantasy
launched by those films. After that, any story involving orphans held a
huge appeal, and if it also took place in Victorian-era England, well,
even better. It was a fantasy that lasted for years. "The Boxtrolls,"
the latest film from the Oregon-based stop-motion studio LAIKA (who
brought us "Coraline" and "ParaNorman"), reminded me of getting lost in
those vividly told and sometimes awful stories of children going up
against a cruel adult universe.
"The Boxtrolls," co-directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi, has a
darkness to it—in the images and in its themes—a darkness that is
practically existential in nature. It's potentially heavy stuff for
children, but children have been thrilling to "heavy stuff" since
stories for children were invented. What "The Boxtrolls" does is create
an entire hierarchical world, with strict rules governing that
structure, and it introduces us to a cast of eccentric and often
grotesque characters who live and breathe in that fetid air. It's
gloriously inventive, wonderfully funny, and gorgeous to look at, the
screen filled with sometimes overwhelming detail. The universe "The
Boxtrolls" gives us is one both strange and familiar: a town that
exists in some kind of collective unconscious with its narrow streets, massive main square, teetering mansions and slimy alleyways. It's out of a
fairy tale; it's medieval Europe; it's Dickens or the films of
Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Based loosely on "Here Be Monsters," the 2005 novel by Alan Snow, "The
Boxtrolls" takes place in a city called Cheesebridge, perched
precariously on the slopes of a dagger-shaped mountain. The town
worships cheese. Cheese is the equivalent to owning a fully-loaded
sports car. If you can afford to have tasting parties where you bring
out the latest Brie, you know you have made it.
Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris) is the Mayor of Cheesebridge, and owner of a
"white hat" (the symbol of being an aristocrat). He has a small
red-haired daughter named Winnie (Elle Fanning). The fearful silly
people of Cheesebridge have been led to believe, through rumor and scary
bedtime stories, that the Boxtrolls, little creatures who come out at
night and pick through the trash, are going to terrorize the town, steal
their children, and eat them. It is Cheesebridge's version of The Bogeyman.
At night, the "Snatchers", led by the snaggletoothed and bulbous-bellied
Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), come out, trolling the streets
looking for Boxtrolls. The goal is to exterminate the entire Boxtroll
population. Archibald Snatcher is unscrupulous, and all he wants in life
is to give up his "red hat" (lower-status) and join the "white hats."
That selfish motivation makes him do terrible terrible things. He is
accompanied by a gruesome trio of helpers: Mr. Gristle (Tracy Morgan),
Mr. Pickles (Richard Ayoade) and Mr. Trout (Nick Frost). Mr. Gristle
cackles with sociopathic glee at the thought of exterminating the
Boxtrolls and is so emotionally blunted he can only repeat the last word
of whatever was said to him. Mr. Pickles and Mr. Trout, however, are in
the midst of an ongoing crisis of conscience. At first, they believe
they are on the side of law and order, they are the "good guys."
Increasingly, though, they're not so sure, and they try to reassure one
another with unconvincing supportive statements.
Meanwhile, we meet the Boxtrolls. The Boxtroll lair is a
beautifully-imagined space: a gigantic cave, crammed full of found
objects, gears, lightbulbs and toasters; things thrown away by the
Cheesebridge residents. The Boxtrolls speak, but we don't understand
their language, and there are no subtitles. The Boxtrolls exist as
beautiful evidence of the sheer power and clarity of pantomime. They
babble and gurgle to one another, and we understand every word. Among the
Boxtrolls is a little boy named Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright), named
so because that's the word on the box he wears like a bulky sweater.
Eggs' Boxtroll mentor is a kindly, worried little creature named Fish
(Dee Bradley Baker), who looks suspiciously like Abe Vigoda (a
connection with his Boxtroll name?) The two play music together. They
are friends. Eggs has always lived with the Boxtrolls, and thinks he is a
Boxtroll.
LAIKA has outdone itself in its imagining of this complex world. There's
a ballroom dance in Lord Portley-Rind's mansion that has to be seen to
be believed. At times, we see it from Winnie's perspective, the big
swooping skirts at her eye level whooshing by her, and other times, the
camera circles up to look down on the twirling colorful couples. The
streets of Cheesebridge are steep and twisting, with lonely streetlights
struggling to emanate their light through the blue gloom. There is a
gigantic bouncing cheese wheel, catapulting itself down the slopes like
some engine of doom and destruction, both hilarious and scary. After a
night of scavenging, the Boxtrolls stack themselves into a sleeping
formation, and, overhead, the bare lightbulbs they have hung from the dirt
ceiling turn their lair into a place of wonder and magic. These images
have great emotional resonance. The details of the costumes are amazing,
the frayed stitching on Snatcher's waistcoat, the tiered ruffles of
Winnie's pink dress, the gleaming ridiculous badges sewn onto the front
of Portley-Rind's coat. The images do not have a modern gleam, they are
not slick. They feel slightly tattered, hand-made, deteriorating.
Without being didactic, "The Boxtrolls" presents the dangers of a
hierarchical society, separated out into high-status and low, and also
has some very interesting and moving things to say about identity,
family, and morality. There is a suggestion that a moral compass exists
on its own, whether it has been nurtured in us or not. Critical thinking
skills means you look around and evaluate reality based on the evidence
right in front of you. The residents of Cheesebridge, drowning in myth,
rumor, and the comfort of intermittent mob violence against the
Boxtrolls, are unable to do that. But Winnie slowly realizes she has
been lied to her whole life. She is able to evaluate her world and see
that the way things are set up is wrong and unfair.
"The Boxtrolls" is a beautiful example of the potential in LAIKA's
stop-motion approach, and the images onscreen are tactile and layered.
But, as always, it's the story that really matters, and the story told
here is funny, ugly, poignant and true.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
A review of Steven Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies" from its NYFF premiere last night.
A review of season two of FX's "Fargo."