The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 28-October 4
Cosmopolis (2012)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Cronenberg, an intellectual polymath with his finger on the pulse of North America’s secrets and shame, has a rare gift for synthesis and adaptation. The wiliest texts become rock solid works of morally deviant science fiction in his hands. Don Delilo’s novel about rapacious capital and its inhuman familiars becomes his most confidently slippery work in a decade and change. Robert Pattinson, a shark in a Gucci suit, practically sweating money in front of us, plays a billionaire whose sole talent is staring through people and discovering their potential to increase his wealth (of experience). This evil, stunted warlock drifts from one conversation, or interrogation, to another, trying to determine who will kill him before the day comes to its indifferent end. Cronenberg presents talk (great reams of the stuff) as a kind of mutual infection between emotionally incomplete monsters, trying and failing to shape the world in their image. After spending years making prestige and genre films, Cronenberg returned to the crystal waters of the wired mind-benders from his early years and found he could still swim beautifully. Scout Tafoya (September 28, 7pm at BAM’s “Pattinson x Cronenberg”)