Cultivates a quiet beauty out of the kind of pain that goes unspoken. A Real Pain is about that deeply ingrained generational pain. That pain where only your family knows how you really hold it. Pain that is held way below the surface, in that everything we do, every way we operate is a projection so as not to surface it.
Jesse Eisenberg operates as a director from a place of patient understanding. The complex familial relationship between his character…
A Complete Unknown is a winning biopic for at least three reasons: fantastic amount of music in it; the bravery and good job done of re-recording Bob Dylan’s catalogue; and the Walk the Line template that James Mangold originated may just be a house style that works for him. It certainly works again here. As the song-to-moment ratio comes into clear relief and probably many of your favorite songs are played and sound good but new you can begin to…
An over the hill Jack Arnold directs Fred Williamson as Stone, Private Eye. Plays like a Chandler Noir that’s maybe meant to also play as Blaxploitation, but only the bouncing Mort Garson score really holds the idea in place. Amusingly, even when it doesn’t suit the scene, like a drawn out fight scene, the score grooves and bounces like it’s just there for some dynamic exploitation flavor.
This only barely passes as a Mystery of the Week type pilot episode,…
Employs Screenlife for a tech horror movie about dating apps. Uses on-screen displays to meaningfully convey ideas, while also creating stakes and tension for the characters. It plays better than it looks and sounds, through cleverness of execution and while it feels very Work From Home Era as a piece of filmmaking, once the character goes to this Under the Skin / Get Out styled Sunken Place, it reveals it’s up to even more than the pretty good use of tech was letting on.
Rides a very fine line between fedora-wearing homage and rigid modern noir. What allows Rian Johnson to get away with it is what parts he has allowed to be adolescent and what parts are allowed to be hard-boiled.
The mixture of demure teen lingo, “who are you eating with?” with detective-speak that sounds like a mouthful of glass is what puts it over. By coyly paying off the amusing parallel between this teenage search for belonging and to be the…
Godard didactically deconstructs consumerism by using the vehicle of beautiful products and tells us what he’s thinking… without ever really telling us. The form either is the function or is fully in the way depending on where you sit. It’s got a bit of venom for commercialism but understands there’s an art in selling something — movies too must be a handshake between art and commerce for them to exist and be distributed properly.
Ascetic Hitchcock about the privilege of Catholic Confessions. A Priest is privy to a murder, told to him in confession, and he must either admit to what was confessed or become a top suspect himself.
The distinct Québécois setting shot in black-and-white is a visual treat, that brings me back to a day spent visiting Quebec cathedrals before taking in First Reformed in the theater.
That Alfred Hitchcock has such a large filmography means that the Pretty Good movies in…
‘90s vibes all the way for the first act then drops right off a cliff the rest of the movie. When it’s just popular cuts of eye-rolling trendy ‘90s music and a Superbad revision, it’s a really good time.
Then it has to go and show us what’s on its mind and it’s so fucking dumb. Goes from chill Mid-‘90s-like throwback (Jonah Hill is also a producer here), but the attractive hangout movie is totally killed off by the higher…
Austere gothic flavor permeates every layer of Nosferatu, a love letter to the aesthetic and spiritual possibilities of darkness in film. These dark machinations are the culmination of a dream project for Robert Eggers. The weight of the dream is evident in the outcome. When a movie is built with visual intention, you begin to realize not all movies are. In Nosferatu, every frame sulks in wintery dark-blues.
One hundred years on, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is chiefly concerned with paying…
Loving someone is watching their childhood favorite movie on Christmas morning and realizing you’d always watch this for them. More dense and about mental health than I’d have expected. Funny and a lot but there’s also utility in it. But the real utility is loving something because it fulfills something for your partner. Would I otherwise feel agnostic about the movie? I think so, but I don’t now.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point feels like a challenge to the present status of The Christmas Movie. It is utterly surreal and yet has no irony. This is an earnest movie that is experientially About Christmas with an ensemble of characters who function as a Complex Family, and it doesn’t say something so much as it glows with vibes like an overlit Christmas tree.
And it feels like you’re hungover from too much mixed egg nog. Sometimes we’re sitting and…
What Conrad Veidt does with his hands, those titular Hands of Orlac, is perhaps our best performance of hands in the movies. Hands down.
It’s a phenomenal role, where Veidt’s Orlac has lost all motor function, the synapses in his brain are no longer moving in conjunction with the muscles within his hands. They have a mind of their own.
Orlac, see, is a famed pianist who lost both his hands and they were replaced by the former hands of…