Word: jarmusch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Broken Flowers held promise of being a breakthrough comedy for Jarmusch. Murray, lately the go-to actor for independent-minded directors, has established an amusingly dour screen personality that twins nicely with Jarmusch's. The writer-director shows his understanding of the Murray persona by casting him as Don Johnston, a man who searches for the mother of his son less out of a passion for knowledge than because he lacks the resolve to say no to his neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), who had eagerly proposed the trip. The presence of Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton...
Like a baseball manager, Cannes programmer Thierry Fremeaux likes to pack his heavy hitters in the middle of his lineup. So in the fat of the Festival, days five through seven of the 11-day film binge, the Cannes Competition slate has star-laden movies from David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch and Lars Von Trier...
...Cronenberg's A History of Violence, a quiet Midwestern family man (Viggo Mortsensen) is accused by some visiting gangsters of having been a hit man in Philly. In Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, a retired computer mogul (Bill Murray) learns that 20 years ago he fathered a child who is now trying to find him. In Marsh's The King, a preacher (William Hurt) who a generation earlier fathered and abandoned a child out of wedlock must pay for his age-old sin when the son (Gael Garcia Bernal) shows up. And in Von Trier's Manderlay, set in Alabama...
...Hidden, the critics' current favorite to win the Palme d'Or, refused to unravel its central enigma. So does Broken Flowers, though Don need only ask a question or two of a few people he meets to find what he was ostensibly searching for. The mystery and the answer, Jarmusch says, is in Murray's face, whose contours and conundrums are always worth studying. A brief glance upward earns as big a laugh as any Will Ferrell pratfall; a tear welling in his left eye has the impact of a Niagara from some soap opera star. But, here at least...
...King takes the Jarmusch film's premise and sees it from the point of view of the abandoned son. Elvis (Garcia Bernal), just out of the Navy, tracks down his father (Hurt), now a Texas preacher with a wife and two kids, like Tom in A History of Violence. The father tells Elvis to stay away from his deeply religious family, but the lad begins furtively wooing the daughter (Pell James) -presumably, his half-sister! And that is just the beginning of his machinations. By the end of the film, when Elvis comes to his father and, like a well...