Gay guy approaching middle age with a dash of Peter Pan syndrome in NYC. Mostly seeking humanism.
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TÁR 2022
A sensational film, captivating and complicated from start to finish, and tonally unique; it's laced with humor even in its most dramatically haunting moments. Despite the film's substantial length not a moment is wasted. Every scene, whether it's a conversation about the minutiae of orchestra management or Lydia Tár checking to see if an annoying sound is emanating from her fridge, contributes to the effect of the whole.
Todd Field's directorial intentions and Cate Blanchett's masterful performance are unusually in…
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Anaïs in Love 2021
With remarkable wit and energy, Anäis in Love sprints through its breezy runtime much like its beguiling, sometimes exasperating heroine, who begins the film bursting forth from a flower shop, where she has spent money that she ought to devote to her unpaid rent on a bouquet that she’ll accidentally destroy before arriving at a party. And yet my response to her—this is the magic of the film’s conceit and of its wonderful lead performance—was not so much tsk, tsk…
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Madeleine Collins 2021
Virginie Efira: greatest working actress?
I spent most of Madeleine Collins thinking, this is enjoyably suspenseful but increasingly ludicrous; the movie felt like a high-toned, French-Swiss version of those psychological thrillers/romantic melodramas that used to be more common in the 90s and early aughts. The gist is that Judith—who sometimes calls herself Margot, and you should notice that neither of these names are the Madeleine of the title—is somehow sustaining a life with two families, using flimsy work-related excuses to…
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Rotting in the Sun 2023
A truly original premise: director Sebastián Silva, playing a ketamine addicted, existentially despairing version of himself, heads to a gay nude beach in Mexico, where Instagram gadfly Jordan Firstman, also playing a version of himself, pitches him a tv show after they are both saved from drowning.
This is both very funny and very dark, and just when you think you’re settling into the film’s loopy vibe—one that titillates with a fairly constant stream of cocks but also expresses profound…
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Asteroid City 2023
A genuinely peculiar film. I'm not talking about Wes Anderson's usual stylistic attributes, all of which are here in pronounced form. Nor am I referring to individual story elements, most of which—absent parents, precocious youth, the transmission of art across generations—he’s explored before. It’s the way it all fits together in Asteroid City (or doesn’t) that feels unusual. There's always something larger lurking underneath Anderson's deadpan jokes and meticulous tableaux, but this time he's grasping at the unknowable.
For the first…
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Past Lives 2023
Oh dear, I’m going to be an outlier on this one, which I liked well enough but didn’t love.
I will say that the film has an affecting and effective ending, one in which the “what if” question that hangs over Nora and Hae Sung’s linked but mostly separate lives expands and contracts at the same time. The sense of closure provided in those last moments brings the continuous poignancy of diasporic yearning more fully into relief.
And yet, so…
