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Stars at Noon 2022
another treatise on feeling lost, lonely and fragile in a dangerous, collapsing post-colonial world from our foremost master of the intersection between the sensual and political. no other filmmaker is as gifted as denis at the conflicted ambiguity between desiring the touch of another and having that touch cursed by unseen material, transactional forces. mq in the running for strangest/best physical performance of the year (even the way she simply walks barefoot in the rainy streets is hypnotizing), and i will be sliding the moody, ambient jazz tindersticks score into my end-of-the-year rotation immediately. were the cannes critics shown a different movie?
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Triangle of Sadness 2022
gonna give this one the light pass because i liked it more than the square and kinda respect it taking the near-parody levels of controlled, euroart satire of that film to a few legitimately funny, anarchic and gross-out extremes. i just miss when his comedic observations of social/physical behavior were contained to intimate character dynamics (like in force majeure) instead of these painfully broad mouthpiece sketches that Make You Think. because when he wants to be ostlund is a pretty…
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The Cathedral 2021
no rating, i was an extra, but i was very moved & impressed by this—at the Q&A Ricky said he had the idea for the film as a college student and aspiring filmmaker at a family funeral, realizing for the first time the depth and complexity of his own history, and you can really see how his modular filmmaking style, with short clips joined by semi-mythic voiceover, scales up into a sustained autobiographical work, a portrait of the artist as a…
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Women Talking 2022
sarah polley makes great movies about emotional process and this might be her best yet
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Eternals 2021
In 2022, it's tough for Marvel to make a movie that's more fascinating than our imagination of what actually happened behind the scenes. Unfortunately those stories are so sanitized and NDA'd to hell that Mickey Mouse would literally have to die before we really understand it.
Paramount is about to release a show called The Offer, which is a prestige dramatization of the making The Godfather. This slightly new angle to strip-mine the shit out of pre-existing IP not through…
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The Card Counter 2021
Me: Can't stand comic book movies. They're all the same.
Also me: Oh, there's a Paul Schrader movie about a haunted, introspective man obsessed with sin who is trapped in a stultifying, repetitive milieu? And he becomes preoccupied with saving a younger person but he's ultimately doomed to carry out a shockingly violent act? And there's a Pickpocket ending? And a moody, goth-rock score?
Four stars.
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C'mon C'mon 2021
Oh man, relentlessly tender! Belongs to one of my favorite drama sub-genres of nice people trying to be nice to each other and not being very good at it all the time but really trying! There’s a lot of dignity granted to the inner lives of these little short kings running amongst us. What Mills does with the radio interviews and books strikes me as refreshingly ego-less, ceding the idea that anything he could write would be more interesting. It…
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Drive My Car 2021
You can draw like four different straight lines from Vanya to MY DINNER WITH ANDRE to COLLATERAL to this.
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Night of the Demons 1988
This was really fun & had everything I want out of a campy 80s horror movie.
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