Demolition

Review by Pamela Zoslov

DEMOLITION opens with an auto accident that kills the wife of Davis, a successful Manhattan investment banker. A similar collision is taking place between the styles of the movie's writer, Bryan Sipe, and its director, the Quebecois Jean-Marc Vallée.


Sipe's screenplay is a conventionally glossy Hollywood weeper, which has Jake Gyllenhaal as the young widower unable to come to terms with the death of his wife, Julia (Heather Lind). Despite the urgings of his father-in-law, Phil (Chris Cooper), who is also his boss, Davis is unable to cry or grieve in the expected ways. Instead, he becomes obsessed with taking things apart, literally — the refrigerator his wife had asked him to repair; furniture, lamps and bathroom stalls at his office; eventually, his shiny glass-box house in White Plains, which he attacks ferociously with sledgehammers and even a bulldozer. It's a clumsy, heavy-handed metaphor for grief and the postmortem examination of a marriage. (He's “taking things apart,” get it?)

Dallas Buyers Club

Review by Pamela Zoslov

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB features two amazing transformations: Matthew McConaughey, who lost more than 50 pounds to play the gaunt, AIDS-stricken Ron Woodroof, and Jared Leto, who fasted down to 116 pounds to become the ailing transvestite Rayon. The physical metamorphoses, though truly impressive and inevitably catnip for people who enjoy Oscar handicapping, are only part of what makes DBC a remarkable movie.

The movie was inspired by a Dallas Life Magazine article about Woodroof, a Texas electrician, sometime rodeo bull rider and loose-living good-ol' boy who was diagnosed with the AIDS virus in the mid-'80s, and devoted the rest of his life to procuring and smuggling unapproved substances to prolong the lives and alleviate the suffering of AIDS patients. (You can read the original article here.) Shot in a quick 25 days with available light and hand-held cameras, the film has a gritty, realistic look that befits the fact-based story. The screenplay was based heavily on recorded interviews with Woodroof before he died in 1992.