KEITH UHLICH
Crimes of the Future. Photo courtesy of Neon.
film roundup
Benediction (Dir. Terence Davies). Starring: Jack Lowden, Jeremy Irvine, Peter Capaldi. The eventful and often chaotic life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden when young, Peter Capaldi when old) makes for a perfect fit with the elegant, emotionally turbulent aesthetic of writer-director Terence Davies. This is the British auteur’s most explicitly queer film since his early autobiographical shorts Children, Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration, one that mixes catty barbs (describing Sassoon’s work, a character suggests it has moved from “the sublime to the meticulous”) with crestfallen visages (as in his Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion, Davies uses digital morphs to show the horrific toll the years can take on human flesh). Lowden and Capaldi are both superb embodiments of the two poles of Sassoon’s life, which pit the passions of youth against the Passion of Christ—fertile ground to 18
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mine for the Catholic-raised Davies. As with all the director’s work, the tragic arc of the subject’s existence somehow manages to be elating, rapturous despite the copious ruts. [PG-13]
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Crimes of the Future (Dir. David Cronenberg). Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart. Nobody makes a dystopian near-future quite as sexy as writer-director David Cronenberg. His latest skin crawler-cum-flesh tingler is set in a world desolated by climate change and other ills and focuses on Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), who has extraneous organs removed from his body as a kind of performance art. Caprice (Léa Seydoux), his partner in all senses of the term, supervises these congregational operations, while fangirlish bureaucrat Timlin (Kristen Stewart) vacillates between policing and reveling in Tenser’s act. Cronen-
bergian images and themes abound (you won’t soon forget the dancer with human ears sewn over his entire body). Though at heart, this is the tale of artists (Tenser onscreen, Cronenberg off) rediscovering their creative passions, a pair of spiritual rebirths to which the state of the world is entirely incidental. [R] HHHH Elvis (Dir. Baz Luhrmann). Starring: Tom Hanks, Austin Butler, Olivia DeJonge. Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of singer and musician Elvis Presley is a hollow shell of a movie, as gaudy and bombastic as one of the King of Rock-’n’Roll’s sequined coats without the benefit of a genuine superstar within. Austin Butler only adequately embodies Presley, overdoing the vocal twang and nailing a few of the signature moves, while still seeming like any random impersonator on the Vegas strip. As his nefarious manager Colonel Tom Parker, Tom Hanks goes more for
