“Money doesn't know where it comes from, but I do. If I keep it, I'm a criminal. If I give it to the government, I'm a fool. If I try and do some good with it, maybe it just makes things worse.”
Deep Cover starts and ends with blood money. Crumpled and ugly, handed over. Director Bill Duke and Laurence Fishburne, who plays an undercover cop, charge head first into a Deep State drug conspiracy. "Follow the money" is not…
Morvern Callar has one of the bleakest cold opens of any film. We see the titular woman (played by Samantha Morton), as she wakes up with her boyfriend dead from suicide on the floor and a computer screen that says "READ ME." The note instructs her to "be brave" and to send his novel to various publishers he's listed. That's the plot portion of the opening, before we even get there we lay with Morvern on the floor, her fingers…
With its disoriented lead feeling like a stranger to people who say they recognize her, lost days, and Vittorio Storaro using a deep cobalt blue for the moon nightmare, Footprints on the Moon works as a despondent, sleepy, and hazy rendition of "Blue Moon" just replace "gold" with red...
Blue moon
You saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own
Blue moon
You knew just what I was there for
You heard…
What makes Nixon really work is the attention to what made Richard Millhouse Nixon a driven politician, his chip on the shoulder. From a poor grocer family, his lack of an Ivy League education, and no family connection just hard work—this also what drove his immense paranoia and imposter syndrome. His political strength was his psychological weakness. And though, in flashbacks, his family uses "thee" and "thy" to harken the biblical and Shakespearian undertones to Oliver Stone's approach, this does…
To give a hint at what's special about TÁR you needn't look further than the opening credits. The opening credits start backwards with members of the crew that generally are at the very end of the end credits, like catering and production units and assistant editors. This is a movie about how an ego can grow too big and turn to manipulation when one role gets too much credit in a collaborative field. An orchestra is like a film set,…
