Julia

Here’s the story of a woman who is such a train wreck, such a toxic waste dump of a human being, that I was surprised she survived through the credits, much less made it to the end of a 2½-hour movie. She gets involved in a hare-brained kidnapping scheme, pretty much making it up as she goes along. She is so awful, so unsympathetic that no one but the great Tilda Swinton could have carried me through to the end. She is fantastic, but even she couldn’t make me enjoy this movie, not for a cringing 144 minutes. Some say the director was influenced by John Cassavetes’ Gloria, a woman and child fleeing bad guys, but Gloria was trying to protect him. She never tied him up with duct tape or left him in the desert with a bottle of water, so I think that’s bunk. And Gloria was 123 minutes, which I thought was a tad too long. This film is epic length, and I might have liked it more if they’d trimmed 30 minutes. I guess I’m just not ready for the Lawrence of Arabia of dysfunction.