“Asteroid City” is a visual feat of a movie with little in the way of substance, in fact, this might be the most contrived Wes Anderson film I've watched. Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Liev Schreiber and Adrien Brody star in it, which adds heft but the photography is helliciously rendered in saturated pastels and so it's weird.
This film brought a sense of emptiness in me. During its two hours’ running time
There’s plenty superfluous commentary in Detachment, most of it delivered via the protagonist’s narrated monologues. We get a classroom lecture on the virtues of reading and the perils of an image-obsessed culture (which makes the image-obsessed Tony Kaye something of a hypocrite); we get cobweb-ridden life lessons such as “the world is a confusing place” and “everyone has chaos.” And in case we can’t tell that the entire
Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland features wordly characters played by even wordlier stars (Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Ben Affleck and Bob Hoskins) who live in the fantastic land of Hollywood and get entangled in a crime intrigue. Hollywoodland is set up like a film noir and reminds of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity or even Sunset Boulevard, with its jaded and disturbed characters turning to each other for support only to find a knife planted in their back.