As worn by King Arthur , they come with built-in halos, which are attached to the back at ninety degrees, like the open lid of a tin can—handy for reminding your subjects that you rule by divine right.
“The Green Knight” is described onscreen, in suitably antiquated fonts, as “A Filmed Adaptation of the Chivalric Romance by Anonymous.” The romance in question is a long English poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which was most likely written in the late fourteenth century.
One option is to snap the whole thing awake.
Above all, we get to hear the line “You’ll be my lady, and I’ll be your man,” which would have surprised Tolkien, one of the poem’s most distinguished editors, and which suggests that the culture of courtly love was au fait with the work of Celine Dion.
Such, we understand, is what would befall him were he to fail in his chivalric duty, and such is the irony that fires this film: it is when the director follows his own path that he finds himself on the overgrown track of the poet from long ago, whose name we shall never know.
Without wishing to point the finger at witchcraft, I’d say that the kinship between “The Green Knight” and “John and the Hole,” a new movie from the Spanish director Pascual Sisto, surpasses mere coincidence.
One night, for no reason that he is willing to share, he uses his mother’s sleeping pills to drug his family, then hauls them outside, into the woods, and lowers them into a pit.
In line with that sense of historical vertigo, the captives seem to fall out of the here and now; exposed to the elements, for the hole has no cover, they grow filthy and then sluggish, slumbering as if in hibernation.
He drives the family car; he cooks a risotto, following a recipe from a laptop; and, when a friend of his mother’s, Paula , shows up, he tells her that his parents are away and, at his creepiest, entreats her to stay.
John has a pal of his own, Peter , is echoed in closeups of John, who is gifted at tennis, hitting ball after ball.
Without warning or explanation, in a scene that typifies Sisto’s nonviolent yet emotionally bruising approach, Lily is left to fend for herself by her mother, who, much like the tennis coach, declares, “This is your life.
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