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Tchaikovsky’s Wife 2022
It’s hard to imagine that anyone could make another movie about 19th century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that’s as febrile and virtuosic as Ken Russell’s “The Music Lovers,” but dissident filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov — freshly released from his Putin-ordered house arrest, but still awaiting trial on ludicrous charges of fraud — has risen to the challenge with his usual aplomb, orchestrating a historical melodrama that’s almost as feverish as last year’s “Petrov’s Flu.”
Then again, Serebrennikov’s film isn’t really…
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Final Cut 2022
In these turbulent years for cinema, when film festivals can often seem like memorial services for the movies themselves, it doesn’t feel entirely accidental that the most prestigious of them all has developed a recent tendency for opening with movies about the deceased or undead. That none of those movies have been particularly full of life is much harder to explain. The trend began when Cannes 2017 kicked off with Arnaud Desplechin’s evocative but exasperating “Ismael’s Ghosts,” and it continued…
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Wonder Woman 1984 2020
Barbara Minerva: I used to be a nerd who nobody liked but now I am hot and bulletproof and can pull off Robert Smith-levels of eyeliner.
Maxwell Lord: but don’t you want *more*?
Barbara Minerva: i want… to be cat.
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