In a banner year for 84-year-old visionaries, Jean-Luc Godard issued his first 3-D feature, a skeptical¹ phantasmagoria that proves the unstoppable innovative² verve of the auteur who set movies on their modernist course with his 1960Breathless. When most other directors stopped modernizing³, Godard went further, into a film-essay form that lays his cantankerous⁴ ideas about life, love, politics and film history over the smidge of a story -- here, the romantic debates of a youngish, often nude⁵ couple (Héloise Godet and Kamel Abdeli). As if he were making the first 3-D movie experiment, Godard shows nature in violent, supersaturated colors and, in one scene, plays with overlapping⁶ images: close one eye and see a man in the foreground, close the other and see the woman in the back. The real star is Godard's dog Roxy, a mournful observer and a great natural actor who embodies⁷ Darwin's observation that "A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself." This latest Godard may be hard to love, but it probes, confounds and exhilarates in equal and unique measure.

 

 

Most big summer movies are handsome, muscular and dumb; in a word,Transformers. Luc Besson's globe-trotting thriller⁸, about a woman empowered and imperiled by the infusion⁹ of a powerful new drug into her nervous system, is different: it kicks assandtakes brains. Besson provides his usual fights and car crashes, before swerving¹⁰ toward a climax¹¹ of Mensa movie madness in the spirit of a berserk2001. The French writer-director, who has often put women at the center of his action movies (La femme Nikita,The Professional,The Fifth Element), here creates a heroine whose rapidly expanding abilities make her the world's most awesome¹² weapon -- in the process, promoting Scarlett Johansson from an indie-film icon¹³ and Marvel-universe sidekick to the movie superwoman she was destined¹⁴ to be. Taking place in less than a day, while simultaneously¹⁵ synopsizing three million years of human evolution in a hurtling 89 mins. of screen time,Lucyis the year's best, coolest, juiciest, smartest action movie.

 

 

The challenge to directors and cowriters Phil Lord and Christopher Miller¹⁶: transform the blocky LEGO figures, with painted faces and no arm or leg mobility¹⁷, into charming or rapacious¹⁸ characters a viewer can instantly accept and believe in. That they did. Worker drone Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt ofParks and RecreationandGuardians of the Galaxy) gets mistaken as the Special One, the Neo of the LEGO matrix, by a cadre of underground rebels bent¹⁹ on overthrowing²⁰ the evil President Business (Will Ferrell). "Anti-capitalist" was the phrase that Brietbart.com applied²¹ to this comedy about the nightmare merger²² of big government and predatory commerce -- somehow ignoring that it's also a feature-length commercial for the world's largest toy company. Politics aside,The LEGO Movieis a hoot²³, and a beaut. Shot in a CGI format²⁴ that mimics²⁵ stop-motion animation²⁶, it has an aptly rough, faux-primitive look, as if some brilliant kid had made a madly elaborate home movie the whole world could love. The sequel comes in 2018.

 

 

In what might have been a gimmick²⁷ but was really a stroke of genius, Richard Linklater began shootingBoyhoodwhen its leading actor, Ellar Coltrane, was a first-grader and each succeeding summer shot a new segment involving Coltrane's Mason and his Texas family: mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette), father Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) and elder sister Samantha (the director's daughter Lorelei). Mason's evolving life has its difficulties but few extremities²⁸; it unfolds rather than exploding in reality-TV's manufactured traumas²⁹. A home movie of a fictional³⁰ home life, an epic³¹ assembled from vignettes,Boyhoodshimmers with unforced reality. To watch it is to page through a family album of folks you just met, yet feel you've known forever. This is life as most of us experience it, and which few movies document with such understated acuity³². Embrace each moment, Linklater tells us, because it won't come again -- unless he is there to record it, shape it and turn it into an indelible movie.

 

 

Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes) flawlessly executes his job as concierge³³ at the Grand Budapest Hotel in the Republic of Zubrowka during the political upheavals³⁴ of the 1930s. Intoning romantic poetry he may have made up on the spot, he attends to the sexual whims³⁵ of his rich old-lady clients; or, as he says, "I go to bed with all my friends." Amour and mortality, romance and horror, comedy and tragedy duel³⁶ to a sumptuous³⁷ draw in Wes Anderson's richtorteof a movie -- perhaps the most seductively European film ever made by a kid from Houston, Texas. A dizzyingly complex machine whose workings are a delight to behold³⁸, the movie has a wry³⁹ smile for frailties⁴⁰, a watchful⁴¹ eye for tyranny and a heart that, under the circumstances of this dark, fanciful tale, must be called heroic. This is not just an amazing contraption, though it is that; it's a real, funny, sad movie, whose performances (from Fiennes, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton and dozens of others) are as alert and elegantly composed as the décor. Grand isn't good enough a word for thisBudapest Hotel. Great is more like it.

点击收听单词发音