After viewing the recent crop of movies (specifically, The Master, Cloud Atlas, Anna Karenina, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, and Holy Motors), film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott discuss the recent trend of these movies and others like it that dispense with traditional Hollywood narrative conventions of familiar plots and established genres to attempt a more interesting and personal kind of storytelling.
Each year we review movies that teasingly or didactically, successfully or not, dispatch with either the whole or part of the mainstream storytelling playbook: they don’t seem to have three (or four) well-defined acts or characters who seem particularly motivated. They (movies and characters both) drift along rather than shift into drive; in other words, they look a lot or a little bit like art films. This fall, though, within a couple of months, there have been more than a few such movies — some released by small companies like IFC Films and others by big studios like Warner Brothers — that, in different ways, appear to aspire more to the art house than the multiplex. I don’t think we are witnessing the emergence of a lasting break with the old, durable Hollywood ways, but we are seeing an exciting level of playfulness.The critics are happy to see this kind of "playfulness" happening in Hollywood even if it isn't always successful.
