A Complete Unknown is a musical biopic that charts Bob Dylan's (Timothée Chalamet) rise to fame until his concert at the Newport Folk Festival. The screenplay by writer/director James Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks follows Dylan as he befriends Peter Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and has romances with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Sylvia Russo (Elle Fanning). If you're expecting a thorough biopic on Bob Dylan, you'll be disappointed because A Complete Unknown only focuses on a small portion of his life. That would've been forgivable if it were more unflinching and emotionally engrossing. Unfortunately, it keeps Dylan at an arm's length from the audience emotionally. He begins as a stranger and an enigma and remains one until the end credits roll. Would it have been too much to ask to get inside his head a little? A fan of his approaches him in an elevator and tries to get him to open up, but he refuses to. That's fine because it's how he prefers to behave in public. Why can't the filmmakers show him during his more private moments to the audience? The audience wouldn't be invading his privacy. Some of the best biopics are the ones that feel voyeuristic. This biopic barely even scratches its subject's surface, takes any risks or reveals anything profound, so it plays it too safely. That said, the music, unsurprisingly, is great and the ensemble cast, namely, Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Edward Norton, Scoot McNairy and Monica Barbaro, give solid performances that breathe life into their roles ever so slightly. At 2 hours and 21 minutes, A Complete Unknown is a well-acted, but shallow, undercooked and sugar-coated biopic. It opens nationwide via Searchlight Pictures.
Number of times I checked my watch: 2
      Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a real estate agent, travels to the isolated castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) to complete the sale of his estate. His wife, Ellen (Lily Rose-Depp), experiences premonitions and warns him not to go, but he doesn't listen to her and leaves her with his friends, Frederich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna (Emma Corrin) instead, in Nosferatu. Set in 1898 Germany, the screenplay by writer/director Robert Eggers begins with a prologue that provides the audience with a taste and foreshadow of the horror of Nosferatu. Before you know it, Thomas has already left his wife to visit the mysterious Count Orlok's estate. Eggers seems more interested in moving the plot forward rather than letting its characters breathe and to develop them into fully-fleshed human beings, though. Professor Albin Eberhart (Willem Dafoe) comes across as merely a plot device. So the dialogue is mediocre at best with very little terms wit or surprises. The film's major strengths include Lily Rose-Depp's raw performance and the atmospheric, poetic and visually stunning cinematography, production design and lighting. The film's visual style becomes somewhat part of its substance, though, but not enough to ground the film in much-needed emotional depth. Physical grit can be found here in abundance; emotional grit, on the other hand, runs too low. Ultimately, it's less than the sum of its parts. Nosferatu opens nationwide via Focus Features.
Number of times I checked my watch: 1