a&e | FILM REVIEWS
A Whole New World The Immigrant. Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jeremy Renner star in a film written by James Gray and Ric Menello and directed by Gray. Reviewed by D.J. Palladino
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ilmed in fabulous sepia-vision, this movie seems to be taking place around the corner from The Godfather: Part II and Hester Street. But it’s a vision of Ellis Island and Manhattan in the early part of the 20th century that concentrates less on ethnic melodrama and more MEAN STREETS: Marion Cotillard plays a Polish woman on the ruptures in the human condition forced into a New York prostitution ring in The Immigrant. that gather around the experience of leaving home to seek refuge in another country. And, like most emigrant tales, it’s about the continuing Movies obsessed with the nature of the social contract human misery that meets most of these optimistic flights. are often set on deserted islands or after an apocalypse. Here we visit the constant problems of trust versus survival That way, every human interaction becomes an unknown as Ewa (Marion Cotillard) comes to Ellis Island in the proposition. The newcomer will either help you or eat company of her sister, who is suffering from some undes- you. James Gray, who loves to make subtle films about ignated lung disorder and put in quarantine. Ewa meets the problems of interconnectedness, creates the same Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) and his brother Emil (Jeremy web of unknowable outcomes on the populous islands of Renner), a pair of raconteur/pimps who want to use her New York. It’s not magnificent, as far as movies go, but it and ultimately fall under her spell. But the central mystery has Cotillard and a final shot that would make Antonioni ■ of the film is Ewa herself. envious.
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FUTURE IMPERFECT: X-Men: Days of Future Past stars (from right) Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, and Nicholas Hoult.
Time Space Discontinuum X-Men: Days of Future Past. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, and Hugh Jackman star in a film written by Simon Kinberg and directed by Bryan Singer. Reviewed by D.J. Palladino
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gain with the time traveling, right? Only this time, the X-Men folks have made the old slipping off the surly bonds of here and now so complicated it’s never rooted in what scientific philosophers might call “the present.” The film begins abruptly in a dead-end future, where an obsessive scientist named Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) has unleashed a herd of super evil, indestructible robots called Sentinels. Way out there and then, the remaining mutants have put aside their longtime differences to devise a last-ditch strategy so crazy it might work. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), they calmly reason, must go back to the 1970s to prevent the robot apocalypse from gaining traction, a plan that includes attending the Paris Peace Accords with Richard Nixon, sneaking into
the seldom-discussed dungeon beneath the Pentagon, and learning why JFK was both so great and so doomed. Coincidentally, it gives the old X-Men cast a chance to hang with the new group, introduced in the livelier last film, X-Men: First Class. It’s a bold attempt at superpower synthesis, but you can’t convince me that this movie, which weirdly resuscitates Bryan Singer’s somehow indestructible career, is superior to Matthew Vaughn’s delight-filled First Class. That doesn’t mean this film is a dud, though. Singer isn’t a good director, and this movie rumbles when it ought to float. Meanwhile, Vaughn’s take mixed trashy comic-book tropes with beautifully conflicting passions. Singer’s movie has showstoppers, including a scene that places future X-Man Quicksilver (Evan Peters) in a three-dimensional bullet-shot sequence that was probably as hard to engineer as real-life time travel. There are a few other brilliant moments, as well. To his discredit, Singer relies too heavily on whiny James MacAvoy and underuses Jennifer Lawrence, which ought to be considered criminal. Yet the whole big thing has heft. After you finish marching back and forth through the eons, Future Past leaves you, like all cool old Marvel Comics did, wishing for a time machine to find out what wonders the future might hold. '■
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