Reviews
The film, whose title sounds like an apocalyptic Simon and Garfunkel song, paints a portrait that raises questions of identity, authenticity, and our relationship to home.
Instead of tracing the more settled trajectory of the film—a gradual fall from grace to match the early passage from unfettered youth to straitened middle age—it seems more apropos to focus on his ecstatic cinematic orchestrations, which are, not to put too fine a point on it, the main attraction.
It is a blessing that the 78-year-old continues to forego retirement, even if it means his films end up unceremoniously dumped to VOD, as was the case with the dazzling and mischievous Passion and now Domino, his surveillance-state European crime thriller.
There is a missed opportunity by Wilde and the screenwriters to deploy sharper satire that pokes fun at Molly and Amy’s limited outlook as white, woke-ish teenagers. This is too bad, since the whole conceit of Booksmart is that these friends think they know more than they actually do.
The Souvenir is a memorable cinematic lesson, so rich and articulated as to be better described as lived rather than seen. The emotional ecstasy it evokes is like falling in love for the first time.
Jarmusch allows the droll humor to be swallowed in a vacuum of inertia, as if the fate of the world has been foretold and the characters are helpless to reverse what they have started.
This might seem to suggest a bit of a creative about-face, for Happy Hour, running a bit over five hours, was not precisely a commercial proposition, but in fact Asako I & II, in the space of two incident-heavy hours, works in every bit as much feeling and active intelligence as its predecessor.
Ferrara places an unusual emphasis on the quiet, placid environment in which his subject worked, the bedrock of domesticity which anchored him though ultimately could not protect him.
Assayas has consistently returned to, and been keenly attuned to, the ways technology affects and reflects our social interactions and familial dynamics—with permanence, or the lack thereof, being a common focal point.
Mitchell crafts a shaggy dog mystery with various potentially aimless threads to create a pervasively hallucinatory atmosphere that suggests danger behind every corner and answers just out of reach.
Rafiki was banned by the Kenya Film Classification Board ahead of its Cannes premiere in 2018, yet it was not erotic content that unnerved those in power and triggered censorship. Instead, it was her compassionate handling of the young love between Kena Mwaura and Ziki Okemi.
The repetitiveness of his project lulls us into surprising moments of realization. We are trained, as when Ji-young repeats herself, to fix our eyes on the slight alterations between films.
Elisabeth Moss plays the character at the center of this swirling psychological vortex, and does so with a reckless abandon that is cathartic and very impressive, if not slightly unnerving in its commitment.
There is some satisfaction that comes in seeing motifs and symbols established within the first part of the film as they re-emerge in the galvanizing high-wire act performance of the second, though I am unconvinced that the seeding of these symmetries can entirely justify the moribund experience of what has preceded.