Fun movie: admirable of Guadagnino - a director I adore - to follow up his box office super-smash Challengers with something so brazenly inscrutable, but I can’t help but confess that it left me feeling just a tad cold.
Surprisingly low-energy, a little too acerbic and slow - you can’t help but feel like you should be having more fun; it’s basically everything I dislike about the last twenty years of Todd Haynes, with the beautiful Call Me By Your Name…
So ceaseless in its simpering and so unfaltering in its whiny delusions that it inadvertently winds up being an incredibly alluring and evocative portrait of one of the most important cultural and political figures of our era. I can't figure out if Ali Abbasi is a total genius or total hack - either way, this is genius.
I'm obsessed with Trump. He fascinates me. I want him to run for Prime Minister. I feel oddly protective of him; the fact…
With First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener it felt like Paul Schrader was delivering his own eulogy, etching on stone a treatise on what the world was but also what it could be. Oh, Canada is a film about a man so wracked with guilt for getting too much pussy when he was young that he moves to Quebec.
It’s a meandering, muddled trawl of a film: thanks to the performances of Gere and the GOAT Thurman it’s…
Generally charming, ultimately tiresome regional idiosyncrasies; faintly reminiscent of the way the Coen brothers handle Jewishness, but without any of the cosmic and philosophical inquiry that make their films so grand and insightful despite their low-key stakes. A few moments come close - the idea of characters stuck in an almost Sophoclean cycle of success followed by catastrophe gestures towards cycles of Southern poverty and systemic neglect, and I adored everything involving Adam Driver's hand - but the film is…
Attack of the Clones as directed by Fritz Lang with a pretty major stylistic choice lifted straight from Gance’s Napoléon; this may be the only film that I’d be genuinely keen to watch a black and white edit of. Sheer riffs and potent vibes, baby.
Genuinely affecting in its sheer earnestness, so that even in its wildest and most brazenly incoherent moments you never fail to see the beating heart of the thing. It is - for better and for…
Really enjoyed this: a few of the callbacks were cringe but Álvarez just absolutely nails the pacing. This blends the slow burn tension of Alien with the relentless sprint of Aliens. Though there’s one jump scare right at the end that felt cheap and unearned, this is sick.
I’ve seen the last two instalments in this franchise in empty cinemas. Seeing this in a packed Friday night screening was a blast.
Aims for slowness and lands at monotony, shoots for psychological realism but ends up feeling superficial and vague. Exactly the same issues that plagued Perfect Days (though this is nowhere near as bad as ol’ Wimmy’s stinker). Kinda over this trend of emotionally muted indies full of faux expressionist gestures that don’t really say anything.
Baker can writer a killer sentence though, and there are some really beautiful images here that are really astonishing for a debut. But it just isn’t enough. I love Baker the playwright so wanted more from this.
"For you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. When the darkness is dispelled, our descendants will be able to walk back, into the pure radiance of the past."
- Petrarch, Africa IX
Spellbinding, beguiling, now, then, here, there, a little everywhere but also - tragically - nowhere in particular. That realisation that life can be more sad than happy, that it's very easy to get stuck on…
In this film by noted homosexual iconoclast Pier Paolo Pasolini, a group of deviant and wealthy perverts abduct a group of doe-eyed teens for a vacation packed with disgusting sexual misdemeanours, faecal suppers and bizarre rituals.
Not what I thought it was going to be: disgusting and unflinching, but also cooly detached and objective. Dare I say, tedious? A very self-conscious film, knowingly theatrical. The camera placed at a distance so that you frequently view the action end-on as if…
So glad that our bien pensant hall monitors have failed in their quest to make art exactly what they want it to be and that Actors is (finally) available to stream.
It's a film bursting with droll anger and deadpan rage, a relentlessly inventive, dizzyingly loud takedown of our vapid cultural moment and the hacks who've somehow grabbed the reins. The plot is loose but what's compelling is that there is a roughness to the film, an intentionally unfinished quality…
Not good - and certainly nowhere near as good as those involved with it seem to think it is - but not necessarily terrible. In fact there’s something in here that’s really quite unforgettable. Some kernel of illumination. Something funny about the fact that the neo-Nazi is probably the most functional and normal person in here. Huh.