"“Acting is reacting” is one of those annoying movie clichés. I prefer its opposite -- reacting is acting -- and as the seemingly passive, unmoored Margot in Take This Waltz, Michelle Williams gives a master class in reactive acting. Take the scene in which Luke Kirby’s Daniel, who’s been pursuing her with a low-key sort of persistence, tells her exactly what he would do to her, given the chance. It’s a scene that teeters between eroticism and ridicule, and we look to Margot’s face for cues, scanning it for signs just like he does. She’s surprised, on the verge of giggling, but also turned on. The scene is filmed in standard shot-reverse shot, but even when the camera is on Daniel, we observe the back of her head, trying to deduce what she is thinking. “I want to find out how you work”, he says at one point, and so do we - though admittedly in a less pervy way.
Margot could easily have been a cypher, a moodily indecisive stand-in for female ennui filmed from a gauzy distance. What’s most surprising about Williams’ performance is how open it is: every single emotion, no matter how fleeting, is reflected on her face. She’s a mystery not because we don’t know what she feels but because we don’t know which emotion will prevail. Take the first “Video Killed the Radio Star” scene, which ended at number 12 on our list of cinematic moments. Within the space of a song, Margot goes from elated to romantic to sad, then defiantly back to happy again, at least until the song ends and she’s abruptly brought back to the real world. Because Williams’ performance is so open, so lucid and transparent, I went along with every beat." - Hedwig Van Driel
"The role Ann Dowd plays in Compliance - at least, to someone who only minored in theatre in college (long, long story) - sounds, on paper, to be a ridiculous challenge. She has to convincingly portray a manager of a fast food restaurant that would not only believe there's a police officer on the telephone telling her that an employee of hers (Dreama Walker) has been stealing but that the very same employee needs to be sexually humiliated. Walker has to just sit there with her perky implants and look petrified; Dowd has to be the Gestapo. And in this visual recreation of what can only be described as a real-life Stanley Milgram experiment (come on, you remember Psych 101), Dowd's character is the embodiment of blind obedience.
What Dowd does with the role is, in short, spell-binding (and mind-boggling): every word from the fake cop is gospel to her, even to the point where she willingly leaves her fiancée alone in the same room with the naked girl (this ends ... disastrously). Early scenes reveal her character to be insecure and an oddball, thus framing her later reactions; when others express their disbelief with regard to the situation, she remains unthinking, unbending and utterly subservient to the Voice on the Phone. It's a fine line between the pathetic and the dutiful and it's ever so important to recall that this really is based on a true story -- when the manager of a McDonald's in Kentucky, a certain Ms. Donna Summers, claimed she was a victim, she was (... in a way): she was a victim of ignorance. And so was the girl she victimized, a Ms. Louise Ogborn.
You'd think someone who is so clearly gifted at her craft would have a more substantial cinematic resume, but it appears Ms. Dowd's career has been littered with mostly bit parts on television and in the movies. Sporting an M.F.A. from the notorious DePaul University (which, at one point in time, had a cut system that 'weeded' out what they considered 'lesser talent'), she's done strong work on the stage, but here in her late 50's, she finally and unquestionably has a landmark screen role (Dowd's husband, coincidentally, also works in the theatre). Full credit is due to director Craig Zobel for casting her for this tricky, complicated role, and with a little luck it will afford her more cinematic roles to utilize her formidable skill-set. In a line from the aforementioned Dr. Milgram's landmark experiment, "You have no other choice, you must go on." - Matthew Lotti
"One of the purest joys that movies can offer is the exhilaration of seeing an artist express his/her sheer joy of creation onscreen for all of us in the audience to share. That is a major reason why a musical like, say, Singin’ in the Rain is still so highly regarded today: Regardless of the details of its setting or plot, we all still remember, for instance, the soul-filling explosion of happiness that Gene Kelly expresses when he prances around town with his umbrella during the title number.
Last year brought an extraordinarily sustained piece of cinematic euphoria in the form of Jacob Krupnick’s Girl Walk // All Day, a 77-minute music video set to the entirety of All Day, the latest album from Gregg Gillis, the DJ known as Girl Talk. But Girl Walk // All Day arguably would not have been half as effective if it had not been for Anne Marsen, the volcanic bundle of energy at its heart. The film itself can be described in many ways: an ode to New York City, an expression of unifying optimism in the face of a certain big-city jadedness, a street ballet celebrating sheer freedom of movement. With her consistently awe-inspiring gyrations and irrepressibly mirthful spirit, Marsen gloriously embodies all of these facets. Let it not be said, however, that she merely plays that one joyful note throughout the whole film. From yearning despair to unabashed elation, this particular girl experiences it all in the course of a day, and Marsen, without uttering a line of dialogue, conveys it all through facial expressions and body movement with a thrilling emotional transparency. Maybe there is another way to describe Girl Walk // All Day after all: as a monument to one performer’s seemingly boundless exuberance and the ways people around her react to it. But though not all New Yorkers take as kindly to her spirit than others, we in the audience are free to bask in it as long as possible -- or at least, until the party ends to the strains of John Lennon’s Imagine in Central Park in the dark." - Kenji Fujishima
"I don’t think I’ve ever had a more difficult time assembling five decent candidates for the Best Lead Performance (Female) category, for the Muriels or for any of my own lists, than I did this year. Only two of my own nominees came completely without hesitation -- Rachel Weisz for The Deep Blue Sea and Eva Green in the sadly underseen Perfect Sense. I hadn’t even seen four or the five nominated women in the running for the Best Actress Academy Award by ballot time, and what Quvenzhané Wallis does in Beasts of the Southern Wild, as utterly disarming as her presence might be, feels more like the latest manifestation of the Ponette Syndrome rather than actual acting.
My only slightly facetious solution to this dilemma: the eternally wide-eyed, super-sized (with cupcake bra to match) pop personality that is the front and center attraction of last summer’s 3D documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me. Mind, on the scale of significant music movies KP: POM hardly ranks as either a pop culture jamboree on the order of A Hard Day’s Night or a brutal generational dissection a la Gimme Shelter. The worst thing that happens during a Katy Perry concert probably occurs during the exuberant performance of “Peacock,” KP’s gonzo saber rattle at the doors of propriety -- a lascivious limerick of sympathy for a devil ragin’ full-on (“I wanna see your peacock-cock-cock/Your peacock”), probably amounting to little more than the occasional shocked soccer mom fainting into her popcorn over the ribald transparency of what barely qualifies as sexual innuendo.
But if the movie isn’t exactly a landmark, then fortunately neither is it a pretentious meditation on the ego-fueled angst and impatience underlying what makes Katy Katy, a Truth or Dare for the “Fireworks” set. No, what makes the movie fun, and what makes me think Katy Perry is a good candidate in the Best Lead Performance (Female) category, is not just the peek behind the elaborate construct that Perry presents to adoring fans but also the consideration of the daunting energy and craft put into the image itself and its constant, cheerful, remarkably anti-cynical perpetuation.
“I don’t think anyone can ever be too cartoony!” the singer gleefully exclaims while putting herself together for the first performance of her first worldwide tour. It’s a moment that makes you want to stand up and salute, a sentiment that distills Perry’s perfectly calibrated self-awareness and places her mix of shiny, candy-colored pop extravagance and (unthreatening) Vargas-girl sexuality well within the tradition of beloved animated icons Sweet Polly Purebred and Jessica Rabbit, both of whose appeal Perry seems to aspire towards. The movie pays only lip service to the greater weight of crafting such an image, but even if KP: POM is meticulously manipulated to present exactly the picture Katy Perry wants disseminated, it’s still a fascinating appraisal of what such a heightened level of pinup performance art might still mean to the audience. I don’t recall ever seeing a movie about a pop singer whose artifice is so up front which is then also so relatively unafraid of presenting the star at her most vulnerable, whether she’s crawling out of bed after a exhausting leg of the tour or laying immobile on a massage table, crippled with grief over her crumbling marriage.
And Perry’s walking the fine line between exuberant amateur and slick professional is itself cheerfully, endearingly enjoyable too. To paraphrase Lennon and McCartney, she may be a singer (with more #1 hits off a single album than even the Beatles), but she ain’t no dancer. Yet her indefatigable desire to connect with the fans is quite something to behold -- you’ll never catch her glad-handing a mom and dad and their goggle-eyed kids backstage, then turning to make a gagging gesture behind their backs. And the tunes, even though they are only largely sampled here, remain seductively catchy, playfully hedonistic, occasionally transgressive, supremely empathetic paeans to the optimistic energy of pop, much like Perry herself. (No wonder she made the Children’s Television Workshop nervous.) Katy Perry: Part of Me ultimately remains true to its title -- this is only a glossy reflection of a carefully selected portion of the star’s reality. But it’s one in which the effort and art of creating her persona is as much in focus as her relentless appeal, documenting the moments when the acting put into being Katy Perry, Pop Princess, merges seamlessly with the joy she takes, and the toll taken from her, as that princess commands the stage." - Dennis Cozzalio
"What happens when the somnambulist starts to wake?
Early on in the viciously funny Killer Joe, Juno Temple has a monologue about her mother attempting to kill her in her infancy. In content and delivery, the piece sums up her character of Dottie in her entirety -- the childishly wordy, matter-of-fact tone of voice gives off a surface naivete that purposefully distracts from the words she says, full of off-the-cuff insults and blunt, perfect understanding. Sharla, her trashy stepmother, claims to her father, "She don't put two and two together like you, me and Chris." Which is true, in that she's the only one in the film able to put things together bang-on and sans bullshit. Is the little-girl guilelessness a pose or a genuine way of thinking, of coping with her alienating surroundings? The answer could swing either way, which makes for a difficult juggling act. It's to Temple's credit that she manages to play both sides of this with effortless aplomb. Using expressive body language and crack timing on the delivery of her dialogue (check how, in the first scene between her and McConaughey's oily Joe, she waits a perfect comedic beat before saying three simple, chipper words -- "Was he alright?" -- that demolishes his carefully-composed worldly cool), she crafts an enigma out of a character whose emotions and thoughts are always right on the surface.
Furthermore, she believably embodies another of Dottie's central contradictions: the accidental sexuality that can inspire a cold logical beast like Joe to attempt a grotesque parody of domesticity and her walking-disaster brother Chris into incestuously protective frenzies. While the intelligence can be either purposeful or inadvertent, the sexuality has to be the latter -- the character wouldn't work if there was even a whiff of femme-fatale manipulation. In other words, the innocence has to maintain even through the obvious hormonal impact. Another tricky balance, and another aspect that Temple has zero problem with; Dottie's indifference to her body and its effects is cemented from her introduction wandering around in a nightgown in the rain, and on that front Temple tips her hand not once. She's not a schemer or a terror like the rest of the irredeemable cast. She's the one glimmer of hope in the black void, the rose in the cesspool, and despite the title, Killer Joe is her story, her progress towards the assumption of her own will. Dottie may not be a genius, may still be a youthful 18 years of age, but in every scene she's in -- even those with the titular character -- she's the smartest person in the room. The magic of Temple's performance is letting us see the intelligence behind those sleeping eyes." - Steve Carlson
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