Tag Archives: dagur kari

REVIEW: The Good Heart Could Use Some Fresh Blood

A grimly modern fable with a giveaway title, The Good Heart wears it modest narrative intentions — along with just about everything else — on its sleeve. A regulation tale of bittersweet uplift involving a saintly young homeless man and a villainous codger with no apparent heirs and a nasty heart attack habit, the film aims not to surprise but to soothe you with the pleasure of its company, its variations on a familiar theme. Despite its capable leads and sturdy framework, in his American debut Icelandic writer and director Dagur Kári relies too heavily on the fleeting rewards of situation for the film to come together as an involving story.

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REVIEW: The Good Heart Could Use Some Fresh Blood

Paul Dano: ‘I’m Just a Glutton For Punishment’

As indie-film pairings go, The Good Heart ‘s reunion of Brian Cox and Paul Dano is a fairly provocative one. A decade after their collaboration in the controversial L.I.E. — featuring 15-year-old Dano as a disaffected young man who befriends Cox’s pedophile Big John Harrigan — the duo teams again in the tale of gruff bar owner Jacques (Cox) and his accidental protégé Lucas (Dano). They meet in the hospital where Jacques convalesces after his umpteenth heart attack and Lucas recovers from an attempted suicide. As the older man’s health deteriorates, Lucas’s applies his sensitivity to opening both the bar and its proprietor to a more inclusive manner of existence. Under Icelandic director Dagur Kári (making his American feature debut), Dano and Cox mount funny, bittersweet pas de deux around the clash of new and old, kind and coarse, and a New York City lost and found.

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Paul Dano: ‘I’m Just a Glutton For Punishment’