The Young Victoria (2009)
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
As the only legitimate heir of England's King William, teenage Victoria gets caught up in the political machinations of her own family. Victoria's mother wants her to sign a regency order, while her Belgian uncle schemes to arrange a marriage between the future monarch and Prince Albert, the man who will become the love of her life.
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What critics compared The Young Victoria to
To hold all these soul-stretching themes together is quite a feat and director Jean-Marc Vallee ( The Young Victoria , Dallas Buyer's Club ) and screenplay writer Nick Hornby ( About a Boy , An Education ) prove themselves up to the challenge.
He seems to have the touch for pulling career-defining performances out of his stars (he gave Emily Blunt her breakout role in The Young Victoria), and Witherspoon proves more than up to the task.
And in the hands of screenwriter Nick Hornby (An Education) and director Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, The Young Victoria), Wild also does some hard work as a movie.
He went from a coming-of-age story called C.R.A.Z.Y to a lush historical epic, The Young Victoria.
The Young Victoria (2009) was a soulless costume movie that won Best Costume Design, and Dallas Buyers Club (2013) was a rather flat rendition of a "true story" that featured two showy roles for Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto and won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for them.
Three prestige dramas in - The Young Victoria and Dallas Buyers Club are his babies also - I’m not entirely sure what it is that Vallée gets wrong about filmmaking, since it doesn’t seem to be the same thing every time.
The director Jean-Marc Vallée, previously best known to British audiences for the pallid, Julian Fellowes-scripted costume drama The Young Victoria (2009), brings a grittiness and morbid humour to the storytelling here that, early on, evokes memories of Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces.
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (2009's "The Young Victoria") and written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, "Dallas Buyers Club" is a tough rendering of a sensitive real-life story.
While there are reportedly some historical inaccuracies in this film ---- Woodroof was not a rodeo rider, for example, although he is shown riding a bronco ---- director Jean-Marc Vallee ("The Young Victoria", 2009) and the writers, Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, supposedly elected to spice up the story to make it more entertaining.
The story of this accidental campaigner – who died in 1992 – is elegantly told by Jean-Marc Vallée, who made C.R.A.Z.Y. and The Young Victoria , weaving in terrific production design and costumes, and driven by a stunning performance by Matthew McConaughey, whose weight-loss for the role is admirable, but is balanced by his trademark bravado and sense of humour that helps make Ron Woodruff such a striking and memorable character.
Tasteful as you would expect of a film directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, whose last English-language film was The Young Victoria , which couldn't have been any more pointedly inoffensive without ceasing to function as narrative art.
Under the guidance of the fine Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée (“C.R.A.Z.Y.,” “The Young Victoria”), Ron begins the movie as almost a caricature of a Matthew McConaughey role — an abrasive, cock-sure good ol’ boy whose charms are only superseded by his narcissism.
The three-time Oscar winner’s credits run the gamut from The Wolf of Wall Street to The Young Victoria, from Carol to the live-action Cinderella.
After making prestige pictures like Wild, Dallas Buyers Club and The Young Victoria, Vallée has returned with a more flavorful film.
Not even Vallée’s best efforts, though, were enough to rescue his subsequent American pictures—the costume drama The Young Victoria and Dallas Buyers Club, a redemptive Schindler’s List-type drama set at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s—from banality.