The Visitor is ultimately about powerlessness, a fable of despair that illustrates how nothing changes if only one man does.
It evinces no interest in the people who come into Max’s store and wind up as fodder for his increasingly violent and self-absorbed escapades.
It boils an entire culture down to repetitive pastiche on its way to that glittering homogeneous fantasyland of sports-movie magic.
Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, like John Hillcoat’s The Road, is an interesting failure.
Has an auteur ever turned on his characters and the worldview they triumph as sharply and definitively as Lukas Moodysson?
For such an ethnically conscious film, there are surprisingly only English subtitles.
The Visitor’s allusions to our fucked-up state-of-affairs feel like gratuitous background noise.
Minor but moving, it’s a story about, and for, outsiders—and PETA members as well.
The film exhibits no trace of the random, goofy humor found in Danny Leiner’s first two directorial efforts.
Make a little room on your shelf for this unassuming DVD edition of The Station Agent. Don’t worry it’ll fit.
The joy of The Station Agent is how McCarthy evokes the loneliness of Finbar’s life using simple stretches of silence.