drama like Vesuvius over Pompeii.
The constantly roaming handheld
camera owes more to gritty British
film-making than its more refined
cross-channel cousin, but the two
schools are vastly different. British
dramas tend to give the impression they’re made by people who
know a lot more about life than
of cinema. With the Gallic model
it’s usually the exact opposite,
and that’s the case here. The impression given is that Zlotkwski
spent her childhood in front of a
TV, absorbing a constant stream
of classic Hollywood melodramas,
followed by teen years in which
she embraced 70s horror. With
her second feature she blends
all these influences into a movie
that’s not quite the sum of its
parts, but like the films of de Palma, displays a love of cinema that
makes it difficult to frown upon.
If you’ve seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s last two films, There Will
be Blood and The Master, Grand
Central can’t help but feel familiar
(ROB’s music owes much to the
avant garde Jonny Greenwood
scores of those movies). Like Anderson’s recent work, it owes
much to 50s melodrama, more
concerned with being convincingly cinematic than convincingly authentic. With the decontamination
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