In “Anemone,” which marks the return of Daniel Day-Lewis to the big screen after his retirement eight years ago (he needn’t be ashamed of reneging on that — it just places him in the category of rock stars like David Bowie), the fabled 68-year-old actor plays a grizzled hermit with a silver-gray buzzcut and a handlebar mustache who lives in a cabin in the woods in Northern England. The character’s name is Ray, and he’s lugging around a couple of Big Secrets — though as the film starts to shade in his identity, you may think his principal secret is that in a past life he was at the center of a middling ’90s art-house film produced by Miramax. Yet over the course of his screen career, which encompassed just 21 movies, he gave performances that were startling and for the ages (“My Left Foot,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Lincoln,” “The Last of the Mohicans”), and he also gave performances that were fine in a prosaic way and not especially memorable (“The Boxer,” “The Ballad of Jack and Rose”).
Author: Owen Gleiberman
Published at: 2025-09-28 21:30:00
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