Paul Haggis often has a way of beating his audience over the head with cultural rhetoric, particularly if we look at Crash as an example. At the same time, a film like Million Dollar Baby – while ostensibly about pugilism and then euthanasia – is actually much more about our cultural obsession with violence, but the hypocrisy […]
Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior looks like the latest entry into the pugilist genre, but its true theme is focused on the sublimation of violence. Admittedly, there are undercurrents of dysfunctional family tropes that ebb and flow throughout the rise of fighters and brothers Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan Conlon (Josh Edgerton). A rift in their teenage years separated […]
From the cuts between time differentiated by the presence of bruises and broken bones, to the seamless transitions from black and white shootouts to crimson-tinted, slow-motion shots of the prelude and aftermath of carnage, Haywire is vintage Soderbergh – perhaps most in its minimalistic qualities. There are plenty of aesthetic touches and attention paid to detail, whether it […]