Whenever I return from a trip out of town, New York seems to have acquired a hallucinatory sharpness in my absence. The city contains more facets per square inch, more bricks, signs, people, and windows than wherever I have just been. It’s as if I am suddenly seeing the city through upgraded glasses, or by the light of a brighter bulb. That visual tingle returned to me recently, at the Richard Estes retrospective that is now living out its final days at the Museum of Arts and Design. (It closes on September 20.) His photo-realist paintings of New York (mostly Manhattan, a little Brooklyn) brim with astoundingly minute detail. Estes dwells on roughened façades, on the bleached light of a hot summer day, on the archaeological traces of sidewalk litter. Humans populate his panoramas like creatures spotted on safari — startling presences, but a little distant and unreal. His subject...
- 9/11/2015
- by Justin Davidson
- Vulture
Flight; Wreck-It Ralph; The Liability; I Give It a Year
From the moment an upturned aeroplane clips the steeple of a church as it plummets Icarus-like towards Earth, it's clear that Flight (2012, Paramount, 15) is more interested in cod metaphysics than spectacular aerodynamics. Opening with sozzled jumbo-jet pilot Whip Whitaker knee-deep in the sins of the flesh (drugs, booze, lust), this moves us briskly to the cockpit from whence he will attempt to save the lives of his passengers with a head full of cocaine and vodka and an oxygen-mask chaser on the side.
The question is: does Whip manage to do something miraculous despite being as high as a kite or because of it?
As the conflicted anti-hero at the centre of the drama, Denzel Washington does a bang-up job of juggling the charismatic and the bedraggled in a manner that effectively captures the spirit of a soul in torment.
From the moment an upturned aeroplane clips the steeple of a church as it plummets Icarus-like towards Earth, it's clear that Flight (2012, Paramount, 15) is more interested in cod metaphysics than spectacular aerodynamics. Opening with sozzled jumbo-jet pilot Whip Whitaker knee-deep in the sins of the flesh (drugs, booze, lust), this moves us briskly to the cockpit from whence he will attempt to save the lives of his passengers with a head full of cocaine and vodka and an oxygen-mask chaser on the side.
The question is: does Whip manage to do something miraculous despite being as high as a kite or because of it?
As the conflicted anti-hero at the centre of the drama, Denzel Washington does a bang-up job of juggling the charismatic and the bedraggled in a manner that effectively captures the spirit of a soul in torment.
- 6/1/2013
- by Mark Kermode
- The Guardian - Film News
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