The Master
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He might not exactly be Steven Soderbergh when it comes to cranking out movies, but to say that the arrival of un film de Paul Thomas Anderson is eagerly anticipated is a little like asking whether the New York tabloids have something to say about the Jets’ quarterback controversy. But is The Master — Anderson’s first film since 2007’s There Will Be Blood, and only the sixth by the 42-year-old writer-director — going to be a touchdown or a fumble?
The powers that be at the Venice Film Festival took away the prestigious Golden Lion award from the film, supposedly based on Scientology, as the rules state that any given film can only win two awards (The Master was already in the running for best director and actor). But will Anderson, his cast and – most importantly – audiences care that it lost out to the Korean movie Pieta?
You wouldn’t have thought so, but audiences do have a right to do what they’re letting themselves in for. The Master stars Joaquin Phoenix as Naval veteran Freddie Quell, recently returned from World War II and unsure what to do with the rest of his life. Luckily (or perhaps not) for him, Quell is seduced by an organization called The Cause and its charming leader, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). General consensus is that Dodd is based on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, and not just because of his physical appearance but Dodd’s claims of being a writer, scientist and anything else on offer.
Does The Master live up to the hype? Can it? One bookmaker has already installed it as the 4 to 1 favorite to win Best Picture at the Oscars and, according to some critics, the odds are apropos. The Daily Telegraph, not usually prone to hyperbole, hails The Master as “a landmark American movie,” adding, “it makes words like ‘bold’ and ‘extraordinary’ seem utterly inadequate.” Rolling Stone‘s review is equally ebullient. “I believe in the church of Paul Thomas Anderson,” begins Peter Travers. “Fierce and ferociously funny, The Master is a great movie, the best of the year so far, and a new American classic.” And by the time you’re done with Glenn Kenny’s MSN review – “Quite possibly the movie of the year, or the decade” – you may feel as if we should hand over the little gold man right now. Thank goodness there’s room for more than one opinion, and a different one is provided by TIME’s very own Richard Corliss who concedes that The Master is “glorious to watch,” it also “brings no coherence or insight to its two main characters.”
MORE: TIME’s Review of There Will Be Blood
Resident Evil: Retribution
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Tagline: Evil Goes Global
From Paul Thomas Anderson to Paul W.S. Anderson this week, and so long as you’ve seen the work of both men there’s little chance of confusing them. The lesser-known Anderson’s latest film, Resident Evil: Retribution, finds the Umbrella Corporation’s deadly T-virus spreading across the Earth, resulting in the flesh eating undead.
At least Milla Jovovich hasn’t been dissuaded from playing humankind’s final hope, Alice, in sequences set in the likes of Tokyo, New York, Washington D.C. and Moscow. What’s that you say? She’s married to the director. A happy coincidence, surely.
Not quite so happy, however, is the solitary notice that has come in thus far, from the Toronto Star. Stating that it’s “the same blah-blah carnage as the first four flicks,” the review goes on to conclude that “the special effects are impressive but it’s easy to grow weary of them, making this Resident Evil look like what it is: a movie shot on a sound stage with a violent digital world created around it.” A ringing endorsement. Right?
LIST: The Top Five Video Game Movies At The Box Office
Stolen
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Tagline: 12 hours. $10 million. 1 Kidnapped daughter.
There’s a fun game to be played with recent Nicolas Cage movie titles, and it goes a little something like this: the more declarative the title, the more you know it simply has to star him. Because if the likes of Drive Angry, Justice, Trespass and now Stolen don’t sound like serious statements of intent, you’re still living in a world where Cage would make art-house fare like Leaving Las Vegas and walking away with an Oscar for Best Actor. (Yes, dear reader, the guy who plays Ghost Rider has an Oscar.)
In Stolen, Cage plays Will Montgomery, a man who was sent to prison for eight years after being double-crossed in a heist that, inevitably, went wrong. Upon being released, all Will wants to do is patch things up with his (inevitably, again) estranged daughter. But the pesky FBI, to say nothing of his former associates, think he’s the only one who knows what happened to the money from the infamous heist. From there, we’re into the faithful realms of kidnapping and ransom, to say nothing of the beautiful Riley (Malin Akerman) who, rather implausibly, was Will’s partner in crime.
Once again, we only have one review to play with and it won’t make for entirely welcome reading for Cage. The A.V. Club understands the raison d’être of Stolen all too well, noting that Cage “seems to have given up on making art long ago; these days, all he wants to do is entertain, and with Stolen, he succeeds, albeit only on the guilty-pleasure level. Like seemingly the sum of late-period Cage, Stolen is unashamedly cheese, but at least it’s cheese of a pungent, flavorful vintage.”
LIST: Trespass in TIME’s Top 10 Worst Movies of 2011
NewsFeed’s Flicks Pick: A masterpiece or not, The Master only need be passable to win the week.