"Amelia deals with every mother's worst nightmare on a daily basis. She is attempting to balance working a thankless job and raising a troubled child on her own. Her support systems don't understand, her son's teachers don't understand, and her son's father isn't around to understand, having died violently before her eyes in a car wreck the night of her son's birth. Fatigue has accrued over the years, and it certainly seems that she would trade her son's existence for the return of her husband in a heartbeat. We want to believe a mother's love is unconditional, but for some women, an exhaustive set of negative circumstances may just provide the conditions necessary to break that sacred connection.
"Essie Davis doesn't give just one great performance in The Babadook. She gives a handful: she's the suffering widow, the resentful mother, the depression victim. The terrorized and the terror itself. Above all else, she plays a woman trying to do her best and struggling tremendously. She's the heart of Jennifer Kent's instant classic, a protagonist/antagonist for the ages. Watch her face as she reads Mister Babadook for the first time: her vocal inflection, the subtle darts of her eyes across the page, the tightness spreading across her body. The film contains masterful writing and editing (and the sound-- my god, the sound), but technical mastery can't replace soul. The Babadook is the best film in years because we haven't seen a horror protagonist so relatably put upon since Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby.
"She somehow makes every character transition seamless, absolutely acing the potpourri of wonderfully startling and affecting scenes she's given. Even as the film slides into melodramatic monster confrontation, she's somehow the same woman quietly suffering from the beginning, the same woman yelling at her child to eat shit in the middle, and the same woman full-blown possessed by a demonic book toward the end. These are the arcs for which awards season was created-- and not to take anything away from Felicity Jones, but Davis' performance can only be described as powerhouse. Yet my favorite aspect of her work in The Babadook? She never resorts to the hammy histrionics we often see in genre fare (and awards season fare, come to think of it). Despite the outlandish circumstances, Davis earns the audience's empathy by remaining as grounded to reality as this world can allow. This is a remarkable feat. When her character murders a dog via strangulation, we feel something... for the strangler. Chew on that, Blake Snyder." ~ Russell Hainline
"On an idyllic sun-drenched summer afternoon, two mildly contentious sisters bond by taking photographs of each other. One, Elisabeth Moss’ Ashley, is a successful commercial photographer and shoots her sister, Eve, in medium and long shots. When Eve takes control of the camera, she pushes in closer and closer on Ashley’s face, ending on an extreme close-up. This compulsion mimics the form Listen Up Philip takes whenever Moss is on screen. Alex Ross Perry and cinematographer Sean Price Williams film most of the characters in medium close-up,their handheld style evoking the uncomfortable intimacy of Husbands and Wives; but with Moss,they consistently push the frame in tighter and hold the shot longer. This seems both by design -it makes formal sense for us to be physically closer to a character we’re psychologically closer tov- and also by happenstance - Elisabeth Moss gives such an interesting performance the cameraman, like Eve, was naturally drawn to Moss’ face.
"Jason Schwartzman, as the unlikable and emotionally guarded Philip, gives a performance that necessarily doesn’t allow for much empathy. The camera is more distant than it is with Moss and, instead, Eric Bogosian’s dry narration provides access to Philip’s thoughts and emotions. Because of this, the narration is an essential aspect of the screenplay; but it lays out a dangerous trap for Elisabeth Moss as Philip’s more openly emotional on-and-off partner Ashley. If Moss is showing us, say, 'sad' and Bogosian tells us she is 'sad,' the multiplier effect can easily make the performance seem over the top, or the narration redundant. Moss is so damn good though, she complements the narration’s described emotions without ever emoting. This open yet measured quality is also what allows her frequent close-ups to read so effectively.
The extreme close-up motif builds to a crescendo when Ashley finally, definitively, puts an end to her relationship with Jason Schwartzman’s unashamed narcissist Philip. In one shot, Elisabeth Moss conveys every emotion we go through when finally free from a toxic relationship: heartbreak, nostalgia, resignation, self-actualization, pride, relief, regret, fear, hope and so on. It’s an iconic, eternal moment. It has to be that good too; it’s Ashley’s last major scene. Though it occurs about halfway through the movie, it must haunt our perception of Philip for the ending to resonate. In the final scene the narrator informs us Ashley was Philip’s last chance at having a human connection, and though he’ll enjoy success he’ll never love or be loved again. In contrast, Elisabeth Moss has shown us that Ashley will be fine." ~ Kevin Cecil
“The twin pillars that Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida rests upon are fascinating women. Agata Trzebuchowska, as the novitiate nun, Anna, has in her face all of the things that are so beautiful about youth – clear-eyed determination, innocence, a desire to see. The aunt that she encounters, as portrayed by Agata Kulesza, on her first foray out of the convent carries a much different type of beauty. Hers is a beauty of experience. It is a crumbling beauty, the beauty of ruins.
“This is what makes her, to me, the more interesting character, ultimately. Anna is obviously a young woman, only beginning to make her way in the world. What is not as obvious is that her aunt Wanda is a young woman, as well. Like many that have lived through harrowing wartime, her relative youth belies a lifetime of difficult, often unspeakable experience in occupied Poland. Pawlikowski's exquisite composition leaves plenty of room in the frame for the oppressive weight of history and no character feels that more acutely than Wanda. In much less subtle hands than Pawlikowski's and Kulesza's, Wanda would have been easy to write off as one-dimensional. Her predilections could have come across as simple self-destruction and it would have been the easy thing to make her a sort of cautionary tale, the template which Anna should not follow. Fortunately, this is not the case. We are presented with a whole woman, a morally complex woman, and Kulesza manages to make her so without resorting to cheap tricks or overplaying. She, like Anna, might have once been in search of something, but she conveys over and over again with small gestures that now she has seen enough.
“Nothing in Ida is that simple, though. Kulesza's performance is so rich that is easy to imagine the girl she might have been. It's easy to craft reasons in your head why she would and should continue to fight those self-destructive urges right up until the moment she makes her final exit, which is heartbreaking not just because she is gone, but because you quickly understand that death isn't necessarily any worse than the life she had been floating through for years. It's easy to feel for her, even though she may have dispensed some dubious ‘justice’ in the years following the war. It's almost less a performance than a bequest. For such a restrained performance in such an austere film, she gives us an enormous amount to carry with us when we go.” ~ Cole Roulain
Warning: spoilers for Gone Girl
"Right after Rosamund Pike's Amy slashes a man's throat during sex, covering her in blood, she gets out from under his body, and gives her nose a little facial wiggle so that she doesn't get any on her nose. It's a tiny, almost throwaway moment, but it's my favorite thing in the movie. It's the almost invisible gesture of someone entirely self-possessed and in control.
"Pike's performance as this villainess isn't so remarkable because of it's casual menace or her ability to generate sympathy for someone we know to be a murderer. Those are relatively easy things to pull off compared to what she's actually doing, which is playing a person who is constantly inside of a performance. At no point during Gone Girl are we truly allowed to know just what Amy is thinking or feeling, only what she wants her opponents to think or feel. It's the aspect of her character that allows her to exert her power over everyone else in the film and more agency than any of the other characters. She's the only one who's able to see her way out of the trap." ~ Matt Lynch
"Can a single performance make a film worth watching? If the question seems a little too easy what about when said performance is a cameo in a five hour film that even the most dedicated of its directors admirers admit is kind of an act of masochism to sit through in one go.
"But that is the question that one must answer when faced with Nymphomaniac, a film that is by turns indulgent, incoherent and most fatally, toxically self pitying. The sort of film in which the lead character's father is shot in high contrast black and white as he dies clutching a single rose. The fact that said father is played by Christian Slater somehow becomes the least galling aspect of that scene.
"So what are we to make of it when Uma Thurman rolls into this mess like a live hand grenade and delivers a comic performance that scorches the freaking earth?
"Thurman plays the spouse of one of the lead's many lovers. Her husband, unable to comprehend just how little he means to the film's main character has left his wife and she comes quickly in his wake, bringing along her two wide eyed, tow headed children to view the 'whoring bed' among other attractions. Most critics have praised the role for its cartoonishness and while there's certainly an element of that (the scene ends with a shriek of rage so primal that it's pre-verbal) what makes the scene work, what makes it so ghastly funny, is how much Thurman is able to convey about her character. Indeed far from being a mere grotesquerie, Thurman gives perhaps the one recognizably human performance in the whole damn film. The only character in Von Trier's menagerie who does not live her life through layers of abstraction.
"Thurman's portrait is that of an obviously intelligent, genteel woman whose well ordered life decided to abruptly fall apart one random evening. This is driving her insane. If she can take a few people along with her so much the better. It's there in the thin veneer of politeness that has turned venomous with which she coats every statement. It's in the wicked gleam that appears in her eye when she becomes the first in the room to truly grasp the situation. It's in the scream of rage that ends her scene, not just anger at being cheated on, but incensed that someone could tear apart her life so easily and care so little while she does it.
"In short- in her one scene Thurman brings humor, horror and pain to Nymphomaniac; in other words everything that is lacking from every other frame of Nymphomaniac. Like an emergency room doctor with a defibrillator briefly shocks a hopeless case to life, only to have it die when she once more leaves it unattended. Is it worth subjecting oneself to Nymphomaniac to see her do that? I don't know. I just know that it is a hell of a thing to see." ~ Bryce Wilson
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