35mm and DCP List Autumn 2012 - Access Cinema

imagery and events (markets crashing, protests), this is not in any way a realist work. It
takes Cronenberg back to territory he hasn't explored since eXistenZ and Crash. (This is
also his first script since those films.) It's a psychosexual, more interior companion piece
to films like Inside Job and Margin Call.
Cosmopolis gives us a young man riding through Manhattan in a limo on a day that feels
more and more like his own handmade apocalypse. He's a super-rich New Yorker, Eric
Packer (Robert Pattinson), a 28-year-old billionaire captain of tech industries and money
markets. He insists on travelling across town for a haircut, even though his driver warns
him that a presidential visit and the funeral of a rap star are causing gridlock. Packer's
world is confined to this luxury vehicle. It's full of screens and gadgets and it's here that
he’s joined first by a 22-year-old whizz kid and then two women, one played by Juliette
Binoche, the other by Samantha Morton. Outside, Packer encounters a protester
(Mathieu Amalric) who is determined to shove a cream pie in his face, his soon-to-be-ex
wife (Sarah Gadon) and a man with a serious vendetta against him (Paul Giamatti).
Cosmopolis is an odyssey defined by a series of one-on-one encounters. There are
prostate examinations, stripped bodies, sex, conversations about Rothko and souped-up
chats on subjects such as the philosophies of financial security systems and how time is
a corporate asset. Much of the talk makes no obvious sense: Cosmopolis has the air of
an experimental theatre piece and trades in heightened, eroticised language. You could
say it tries to turn the mind of Packer inside-out: to make the psychological real. That's
tougher on film, surely, than in print, and Cosmopolis is at its best when it's otherworldly
and aching with artifice. It's at its worst when it becomes weighed down by an excessive,
wearying wordiness, or when it steps out of the limo – the film's self-imposed arena of
surreality – and into a place more like the real world. Cosmopolis threatens to soar and
to be important, but it only offers flashes of lucidity; the limo is a mesmerising bubble that
is quickly burst when the film steps outside it.
That said, there's a consistent air of charged, end-of-days menace running through the
film, which Cronenberg handles with an unbroken sense of precision and confidence.
He's well-served, too, by a leering, disintegrating Pattinson, giving a commanding,
sympathetic portrait of a man being consumed by his own vanity and power. - Dave
Calhoun, Time Out London
Dark Horse
Dir: Todd Solondz USA 2011 85 mins Cert: CLUB
Starring: Jordan Gelber, Selma Blair, Mia Farrow, Christopher Walken, Donna
Murphy
Language: English
Available: From September
Formats: 35mm + D-CINEMA
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqOCODCZ1OQ
Deep or dreadful neuroses may be the lot of people in Todd Solondz's films — the lonely
teenager in Welcome to the Dollhouse, the convicted pedophiles in Happiness and Life
During Wartime, the college student who lies her way into a bout of sex with her Pulitzerwinning
prof in Storytelling — but damned if the writer-director doesn't find humanity, and
the scalding sympathy of wild humor, in their failings. The plus-size misfit at the center of