My entire world view in high school was based on the exact way Juliette Binoche says, “I don’t know anything!” in THE ENGLISH PATIENT.
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Joyland 2022
Don’t make it suffer
Concerned that in even the more positive analysis of Joyland, audiences seem so committed to turning this dishevelled, warm, thorny, ambivalent story about the becoming (and unbecoming) of a particular man and the people around him into something defined only by the conceptual. There’s something disconcertingly off, and vaguely essentialist, about reading Joyland through a narrow prism of the easily definable kind of social commentary many would have it be. A story of query identity? An…
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Glass Onion 2022
If I were a better man, I would probably just say that I was willing to give this the benefit of the doubt despite not gelling with Knives Out but this ultimately did not work for me. But I am not a better man. I am a much much worse man, through and through. So, I shan’t equivocate. Let's do this.
There is a cutaway moment where a character says, “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room!”. And we…
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Emergency 2022
It holds up!
Glad I rewatched this to assuage my guilt that maybe I just put Sebastian Chacon on my Best Supporting Actor ballot just because he’s hot.
He’s the perfect weird/nerdy/earnest/funny foil in this and the thoughtfulness put into his arc is such a good mark of how clear-eyed this is about regular dynamics of college-ages men as well about the more macro race issues. It’s such a wonderful supporting turn in a wonderful ensemble.
(He is also very hot, though.)
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The Woman King 2022
Viola this and Viola that but the real robbery is the real FYC this deserved.
Best Actress Thuso Mbedu
Best Supporting Actress Sheila AtimStill same take as before. Visceral. Energetic. Historically messy, a bit too morally ambivalent but so very engaging and fun.
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The Kid Detective 2020
Have you ever seen a movie deconstructing itself? There’s a metatextual quality to the narrative progression here that’s right up my alley. The Kid Detective morphs from wish-fulfilment comedy to ambivalent arrested-development comedy to a mordant mixture of both then to satire before it shifts to a chilling psychological drama with flourishes that seems almost unpredictable. But the through-line, which the film progressively develops, is that this is a story of a man working through issues of depression and guilt…
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Fire Island 2022
Allow me some pedantry: If you’re going to build your entire film on (poorly) paralleling Pride and Prejudice, feature Austen’s opening line as the first line of dialogue while caustically commenting on it in a voiceover and then not acknowledge that Austen’s narrator is being deliberately ironic when they presume men are in want (a very deliberate pun; want as in desire but also want as in to lack) of a wife then I’m already second-guessing your approach to comedy, analysis or…
