Yahoo Movies The Crown star's new movie lands 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating
The Crown's Josh O'Connor has gone weird for his latest film project, and it's paid off.
La Chimera stars O'Connor as an Englishman living in Tuscany during the late 1800s, when graverobbing was rife among people looking to make a quick buck.
His character, haunted by the loss of his wife, is living in a shack on the outskirts of town, with only a crumpled suit to wear. And he may be psychic.
The film is the latest from Alice Rohrwacher, completing an informal trilogy — after The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro — that looks at the relationship between Italy's past and present in the director's "magical neo-realism" style.
Following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, 10 critics have reviewed the film, with all of them positive, leading to its 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating (at the time of writing).
O'Connor's central performance as main character Arthur has been consistently praised, with IndieWire writing that his "exquisite performance seems to channel Harry Dean Stanton’s haunted turn in Paris, Texas; less wraith-like in its physicality, but similarly intangible, like a man being played by his own shadow".
"Raffish and boyish at the same time — or switching between either mode as a cover for the other — O’Connor’s deft, droll performance implies such possibilities without sentimentalising them," Variety writes. "His quiet curiosity as a performer makes him a good match for this somehow most generously elusive of filmmakers."
The Times calls the film "wonderfully strange", while The Hollywood Reporter cited the changes in tone, film formats and aspect ratio, and levels of reality an "appealing looseness", and ScreenDaily adds that La Chimera "succeeds when it doesn’t worry too much about neatness and precision."
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