Holy Motors Movie Review

All the world’s a stage, right? And each of us is merely a player with many roles to perform. Monsieur Oscar has many performances (or appointments) to give during the course of one day in Leos Carax’s enigmatic and occasionally frustrating Holy Motors.

Oscar (Denis Lavant) is driven around Paris in the back of a white limousine. Inside the space he occupies seems impossibly large and is outfitted with all manner of makeup, wigs, prosthetics, costumes, and props for Oscar to play, at different points in the day, a beggar woman, a technical stand-in for an action sci-fi film, a thug, a father, and on and on. His driver Celine (Edith Scob), who also serves as his assistant, tells him at the start of the day he has nine of these appointments, but I lost count around five.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico Movie Review

The third film in Robert Rodríguez’s “Mariachi” trilogy takes its title, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, as an homage to Sergio Leone. The title reputedly suggested by friend Quentin Tarantino, who told him that this was his “Dollars” trilogy (in reference to Leone’s three spaghetti westerns featuring Clint Eastwood, the third of which is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and in which Once Upon a Time in the West plays no part). None of that matters, though, because Rodríguez and Tarantino love to riff on the culture of coolness. They love being in the know and they love to throw little tidbits in for their fans who are also ‘in the know’.