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  • Knock at the Cabin

    Knock at the Cabin 2023

    ★★★★★ Watched 02 Feb 2023

    This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

    There's not a single other craftsman working that is making films as straightforwardly and excessively brilliant as this.

    I have little to add in the structure of a formal review, so just some loose thoughts I shared with my Discord group below.

    SPOILERS FOLLOW.

    I didn't say much in my review at this stage but I loved everything about it. It's probably the best performances he's wrangled from actors since the early days. This is going to sound bizarre but…

  • Elvis

    Elvis 2022

    Watched 31 Jan 2023

    Not sure about this kind of secular hagiography hey

  • Magic Mike

    Magic Mike 2012

    Rewatched 30 Jan 2023

    Still very acerbic and unpleasant to watch, surprisingly so. Curious to see what they do with the third one, given the major differences between this and its sequel. Bring it on.

  • The Whale

    The Whale 2022

    Watched 29 Jan 2023

    Darren Aronofsky was one of my first cinematic loves as I was initially exploring the medium nearly a decade ago. He and I have fallen out of touch since. I now tend to view his work as leering, pornographic and manipulative, with the exception of The Fountain which remains a very delicate and accomplished work.

    But this film put me back in touch with him, and reminded me why I fell in love with the very medium in the first…

  • Bottom

    Bottom 2012

    Watched 27 Jan 2023 2

    "“I scream for the illegible”, Goldkind pleads, “where the Narrative as structure and the epidermis as body can find […] its potential to be illegible, to be of a subjectivity rooted in the experiential.” Queer art can indeed only be illegible, crafted from a language of its own, effaced, coded, lying in wait as an undercurrent of unfamiliarity, depravity, of fearsome transgression against all that is permitted, all that has been consecrated in the lexicon of artistic expression. Bottom represents…

  • Triangle of Sadness

    Triangle of Sadness 2022

    Watched 25 Jan 2023

    Great final shot! But otherwise, the weakest in the long line of Östlund bids for international cinematic attention. All of the rest (even the fairly dramatically impotent The Square) have serious ideas, and those ideas are staged within the composition and structure of the work itself. This one is very fun scene-by-scene but extremely immature on the whole in its exploration of class struggle (I mean, the hand-grenade manufacturers get killed because of their own hand grenade, for gods sake).…

  • The Banshees of Inisherin

    The Banshees of Inisherin 2022

    Watched 24 Jan 2023

    Farrell is mostly great (there are a few off beats in the first act) but this is very dramatically inert, as is typical for McDonagh on the screen—he is a functionary of the written form and one of the great playwrights of the century—this is not a play.

  • Babylon

    Babylon 2022

    Watched 22 Jan 2023 1

    can’t help but be totally on board with something giving directors jail as hard as this. too many bodily fluids. SO MANy. Margot Robbie is amazing. We’re really watching all the best directors of our generation self immolate in the name of crass scale. Fin de cinema. A towering polemical achievement and I’m only half joking

  • Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

    Puss in Boots: The Last Wish 2022

    Watched 22 Jan 2023 2

    very tik tok generation movie

  • Touch of Crude

    Touch of Crude 2023

    Watched 20 Jan 2023

    Refn continues the oblique streak that started in 2013 and has intensified since with this short film production for Prada.

    I hope this first sentence rings as more than just a descriptive orientation point for the work, but also as a blueprint to the muted critical reception. Short films tend to draw the short straw when it comes to fair critical assessment, as does video work in the realm of advertising, propaganda, and, yes, galleries. So dispense with anything you…

  • Aftersun

    Aftersun 2022

    Watched 19 Jan 2023

    The vast majority of this is very restrained and lovely, taking after Wells' influence Akerman, and I was pretty much entirely onboard until the climactic two scenes put a little too much emphasis on the dynamics of a relationship that an entire, beautiful and subtle movie has already been about. I'm not sure we needed the underlining. It's kind of like an inverted Beau Travail in this way, as Denis' film never quite gets going until it presses down on…

  • On the Prowl

    On the Prowl 1989

    Watched 18 Jan 2023

    Very beautiful and abstract work of political import by Jamie Gillis. It operates politically at least in part because Gillis is making no explicit political statement. On the Prowl very clearly demonstrates the systemic manner in which power is encoded on even the most abstracted, microcosmic and personal level. And pornographic because, as Peter Sotos writes, the abuse of these power relations were "clear and easiest and worthwhile at the time."