The Playlist:
A series of controlled demolitions laid with meticulous care to undermine and ultimately explode the rottenness of institutional authority, particularly that of the Catholic church, Pablo Larrain's "The Club" burst onto the screen this morning in Berlin, and still now, debris rains down all around. A bold, blunt, yet clinically intelligent film that provokes as much for its dark humor as for its righteous outrage, it's all at once a gripping thriller, an incendiary social critique and a mordant moral fable. The confidence on display from Larrain, who broadens the purview of his already excellent "Pinochet Trilogy" ("Tony Manero," "Post Mortem," "No") is impossible to overstate: this film is his finest hour to date.
The Club part 2 is a slow, methodical drama that takes its time revealing details about the past.
AVClub: About midway through Tom McCarthy’s award-winning newspaper drama Spotlight, one of the film’s crusading journalists makes a shocking discovery: Right down the block from where his children live and play is a rehab house for Catholic priests—a place, in other words, where disgraced clergymen lay low after the church finds out about their pedophiliac indiscretions. The moment is played for queasy dread, as this horrified father gapes in disbelief at a sanctuary for sexual predators, hidden in his own neighborhood. The Club, the new film by Chilean director Pablo Larraín (No, Post Mortem), effectively reverses that gaze: Here, our main characters are the fallen-from-grace holy men themselves, peeking out through tightly drawn curtains. But this is no sympathetic drama of absolution, no portrait of forgiveness sought by sinners. Larraín is after something trickier and harder to pin down; he asks us to share real estate with these men, while offering few windows into their heads or hearts, or even a clarification of their crimes.
