With her statuesque beauty, Israeli-born actress Ayelet Zurer has made a strong impression in genre fare like Angels & Demons and Vantage Point and especially heavy, hard-hitting dramas like Fugitive Pieces, Adam Resurrected and Steven Spielberg’s Munich, in which she played Eric Bana’s sympathetic wife and served as his emotional mooring. Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan’s Darling Companion, then, represents a nice, unexpected change-up for Zurer, who plays Carmen, an exotic seasonal housesitter who ends up helping her employers (Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline) search for their missing dog, and in the process develops an unexpected connection with a member of their extended family, Bryan (Mark Duplass). I recently had a chance to sit down with Zurer one-on-one, and talk about the movie, Kasdan, psychic inclinations, and her role as Lara Lor-Van in Zack Snyder’s hotly anticipated Man of Steel. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here.
Daily Archives: April 19, 2012
Monsieur Lazhar
A Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee from (French) Canada, Monsieur Lazhar is a psychologically perceptive, humanistic tale of adolescent grief, wayward adult yearning, and how emotional healing can often arrive from the most unexpected sources. Anchored by an award-winning lead performance, the understated movie develops slowly, like a Polaroid, into something greater than the sum of seemingly simple parts.
Starring Mohamed Fellag, Monsieur Lazhar is so effective at connecting, no matter its nominal foreign status, because it unfolds in a world that recognizes and embraces complexity and duality, and isn’t dishonest about the piecemeal way in which emotional centeredness is often achieved. There are not writ-large catharses here, but rather honesty and setbacks followed by smaller moments of betterment. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Music Box Films, PG-13, 94 minutes)