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Film reviews: ‘Wicker,’ ‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
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Wicker “is not your mother’s olden-times cinematic fable,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Instead, viewers are treated to “a kooky, sex-crazed folk tale” about a fisherwoman in a vaguely medieval village, played by Olivia Colman, whose lifelong loneliness is cured when a basket maker weaves her a sentient wicker husband. Alexander Skarsgard is the soft-spoken, doting, and frisky wooden spouse, and “you emerge from Wicker with the sense that no other actor could have played this creature.” Likewise, the fisherwoman’s awakening into randiness “feels singularly like something only Colman could sell.” Yet the actress also imbues her long-suffering, ostracized character “with grounded pathos” that anchors “the rest of the movie’s airy whimsy.”
Wicker is “at its best when charting the power of desire,” said Angelica Jade Bastién in NYMag.com, and “it’s rare to see an older woman’s sexuality and interiority explored with authenticity and care.” Alas, “I regret to inform you that Wicker is nowhere near as horny as it needs to be.” Frustratingly, the focus moves from our protagonists’ bedroom frolics to the townsfolk, who are outraged at a steamy love that reveals their own lack.
There’s also a conventional late-film tonal shift that doesn’t work, said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. “It’s hard to buy that a woman this smart would fall for the requisite crisis that ends the second act of most movies.” But that’s “a small flaw.” This otherwise delightful film provides “sharp commentary on the way men treat heterosexual relationships—and men ought to pay heed.”
‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’
Directed by Noah Segan (R)
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★★★
An aging thief targets the wrong mark.
“Somehow, despite a 40-year career full of memorable roles, John Turturro is still underrated,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. This quiet gift of a new movie, in which he plays an aging pickpocket still skillfully plying his fading trade, “lets him showcase all of his best qualities: He gets to be quick-witted and fleet-footed, but also full of love and grief.” Though Turturro’s Harry Lehman gets himself into a jam when he lifts the wallet of a mob-connected subway passenger, the movie remains less about Harry’s subsequent race to save his skin than “the loose spider web of connections that we create, by necessity or affinity,” with the people we interact with on a routine basis.
The film is “obsessed with the gap between the old and new,” to the point that it arguably overplays the theme, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. And a third-act cameo by a former Oscar winner feels out of place rather than like a happy surprise. But Noah Segan’s wistful crime drama runs a tight 88 minutes and never ceases to be engaging, and “Segan does manage a satisfyingly bittersweet ending.”
It helps that the director has packed the film with terrific actors, said Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Times. Besides Turturro, we get Tatiana Maslany as Harry’s estranged daughter, Giancarlo Esposito as a detective who has tangled with Harry for years, and Steve Buscemi as Harry’s go-to fence. “This one’s a low-key charmer. Start spreading the news.”
