Cláudio's Best Shot Pick: Ex Machina (2014)

The next episode of our series, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot,' arrives Tuesday night. Since Alex Garland's Men is upon us, this week's selection falls on the director's breakthrough feature – the Oscar-winning Ex Machina. You still have time to participate! Here's Cláudio's entry:

Even though one tries to avoid the online discourse around Men – at least until everybody has had a chance to watch it – some grumblings are rather hard to block off. If that wasn't enough to affect the expectations going into the new movie, this look back at Ex Machina certainly does. The sci-fi chamber drama is a formidable reminder that Alex Garland is a better director than a writer, colligating blunt ideas and blunter dialogue with spellbinding form. Within the realm of glances refracted through glass labyrinths, insinuating architecture and eerie eroticism, Ex Machina triumphs. It's when its characters open their mouth to blabber on that the appearance of cinematic greatness gets spoiled. 

Thankfully, Hit Me with Your Best Shot is about visuals, so we're in a safe place with Ex Machina. Whatever misgivings I might have, the film looks impeccable…

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Dune: Top 10 Best Costumes

by Cláudio Alves

Dune feels more like a period movie than a sci-fi extravaganza as fashioned by costume designers Jacqueline West and Bob Morgan. West, who studied Art History, has described the aesthetic she and Morgan conceived as "mod-ieval, looking to the past for the distant future." While the story takes us to a faraway tomorrow, the world doesn't look new. Instead, it feels ancient, used-up before we ever laid eyes on it, sand-blasted but not rotten like the Lynch movie. Stuck in feudalistic pageantry and a political system that squashes the individual under imperial rule, Dune is an anachronism expanded to the monumentality of a space opera. An incredibly ambitious project, the movie deserves applause for its scale and, indeed, its costumes. 

Even the most negligible extra in the background of scenes is splendidly dressed, their ensembles as thought-through as the hero costumes. With that in mind, I decided to highlight this sartorial glory by re-watching the flick ins search of its best looks, be they worn by movie stars or background actors. There's so much to admire…

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How Had I Never Seen..."Dune"?

by Cláudio Alves

Audiences are here for Denis Villeneuve's take of Frank Herbert's Dune – its first half, to be specific. Box office numbers already guaranteed the filming of its sequel, and now there are even talks of a third movie, adapting the second book in the series, Dune Messiah. As the world goes mad for spice and space twinks, Goth nuns, and more made-up sci-fi terminology than you can shake a stick at, it feels like a good time to look at the last big-screen adaptation of Herbert's genre-defining novel. While much hated by its maker, David Lynch's Dune has gained quite the cult following over the years. Indeed, researching this piece, I came across plenty of retrospective defenses of the movie's merits, passionate screeds against its maligned critical reputation.

Does the flick earn such reappraisals, or were the initial reactions right all along? Well…

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How Had I Never Seen..."Independence Day"?

by Cláudio Alves

Some of my recent choices for the "How Had I Never Seen" series may have leaned towards the esoteric. Probably most people don't wonder why or how they have never set eyes on Valley of the Dolls or Girlfriends. This time around, however, I've decided to fix a pretty deep lacuna in my movie-watching, one that's firmly in the mainstream rather than an arthouse curio. Today marks the 25th anniversary of Roland Emmerich's 1996 Oscar-winning mega-blockbuster Independence Day. To commemorate the date, I finally watched the flick that turned Will Smith into a star of the silver screen, redefined the effects-driven summer movie, and birthed a new era of Hollywood entertainment… 

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Almost There: Jodie Foster in "Contact"

by Cláudio Alves

This past weekend, Jodie Foster threw a wrench into the Best Supporting Actress race, surprising pundits when she won the Golden Globe for The Mauritanian. Maybe we shouldn't have been so shocked; The Academy hasn't acknowledged Foster since her 1994 nomination for Nell, but the HFPA never stopped loving her (8 nominations, 3 wins, 1 lifetime achievement). Three years after her last Oscar nomination, she was back on the hunt for a Golden Globe. The movie was Robert Zemeckis' Contact and the role was one of the most challenging in the actress' long career…

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