Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 127: Fri May 6

Knight of Cups (Malick, 2015): Rio Cinema, 4pm & 8.45pm & Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm


The latest film by the leading director finally gets its UK premiere. At the Prince Charles Cinema it's part of a full Terrence Malick retrospective. Full details here.

Review:
(Presumably) completing his spiritual-quest trilogy which began with the cosmogonic, bewilderingly diffuse Palme d’Or winner “The Tree of Life” (2011) and continued with the more overtly (and detrimentally) evangelical “To The Wonder” (2012), Malick has delivered an exasperating, exhilarating magnum opus, a film with unapologetic, vaulting ambition that is to be prized, even cherished. That said, those who found “Tree of Life” and “To The Wonder” too elliptical, too whispery, too grandiose, too “Malicky” will want to steer well clear of this elliptical, whispery, grandiose enterprise, which conjures sharp shards of narrative and assembles them not into a coherent, conventional narrative, rather a glittering kaleido-mosaic. It’s held together by a loose Tarot-inspired structure (prologue and eight chapters, each of the latter named for a particular card); by a haunting score (original compositions by Hanan Townshend intermingle with a slew of classical samplings); by Emmanuel Lubezki’s swooping, prowling, never-resting camerawork (widescreen images run the gamut from crystal-def to GoPro, including a handful of near-subliminal glitches presumably left in on purpose ); and by the central figure of Rick, a mega-successful Hollywood screenwriter played by Christian Bale (returning to the Malickverse a decade after “The New World”).
Neil Young (you can read the full review here)

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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