Even so, God of War III has visual astonishments in almost every scene.
Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun," from 1987 — screening in the "See It Big!" series at the Museum of the Moving Image on Dec. 3 — is a procession of visual astonishments.
By David Denby Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun," from 1987 — screening in the "See It Big!" series at the Museum of the Moving Image on Dec. 3 — is a procession of visual astonishments.
The work is a visual as well as a historical astonishment: fresh and brilliantly colored, looking practically new, it is covered with fantastical images of African animals and big fish eating little fish and a whale about to swallow a ship.
Indeed, Ms. Rosenthal's work is so scrupulous and unassuming that after a while you might begin to take it for granted and to allow astonishment at the film's visual texture to give way to impatience with its story.
What follows are an astonishment of black-and-white and color visuals of Ceausescu at work and play through the decades — waving at workers, delivering speeches, sampling baked goods, driving a domestic car, meeting the queen of England — official images that helped sustain the lie of success he embodied.
Initially, the visual impact of the scenes - those towers collapsing with malign majesty - extended our state of fevered astonishment.
There is a clinical syndrome known as "blindsight," resulting from brain damage, where the subject — to his own astonishment — finds he can "see" the properties of things he's looking at, even though all visual sensation has been lost.
The lavish visual rapture of Malick's film, thanks to the swooping, plunging, choreographic cinematography, by Emmanuel Lubezki, is a series of astonishments both negative and positive, and its ultimate reach is radical, challenging the life styles and cinematic styles of Hollywood and, for that matter, its very existence.
