Florence Pugh, ride or die. That is all.
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The Sea Beast 2022
Beautifully animated ocean views and luscious waves but the characters are all too unironed, no wrinkles, pristine like Shampoo Bottle characters. Personality removed.
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Aftersun 2022
Memories are the best and the worst. These quiet moments on vacation, times of euphoric happiness, tinged with loneliness and alienation and warped by time and nostalgia vines. Our daughter and father are both beautiful and broken souls perfect for each other. Swayed between healthy relationship and recklessness of young parents. Under Pressure montage is the needle drop of the year. Each shot is perfectly composed. I want to paint these stills.
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Broker 2022
Koreeda masters the ensemble of actors, creating a family out of misfits and broken parts. Never too saccharine and always stinging as much as sweet with a really interesting and existential debate of parents and children and the messy world everyone is willed into joining. The ferris wheel is the scene.
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White Noise 2022
Adam Driver works perfectly in this hapless lead while also being obnoxiously vain, a la many Baumbach protagonists. The production design and artistic direction give another hue to the drab 80s and inject them with Pepsi ad colors and every scene in the supermarket is glorious, culminating in the end credits.
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The Black Phone 2021
Ethan Hawke as a villain will always work for me? And here is one of the instances where the desaturated tone of the film works in favor of this grimy, rough world of true crime and 80s paranoia.
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Great Freedom 2021
Franz Rogowski is one of the best non English speaking actor and he needs an Oscar.
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Retrograde 2022
No easy way to rip off a bandage that has been on a wound for too long. Every sacrifice matters and yet every sacrifice feels so futile. War is hell but retrograde feels like hell in a different shade of fire and blood.
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Fire of Love 2022
Beautiful footage of a relationship that is deeper than a simple marriage. A bond of a shared interest with differing approaches and balance between these two adventurers.
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Under the Banner of Heaven 2022
Andrew Garfield and Gil Birmingham are the knockout cop duo: one playing the conflicted, and naive yet insider with the other being the worldly, rougher, but also cool and collected when his partner starts to fray. An interesting and brutal take on the book and adapting with fictional elements that do not take away from the essence of the story.