This isn’t the first film about Bob Dylan but it’s probably the biggest. In documentaries like DA Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back or Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, we get the illusion of candor, glimpses of real life, imagesRead Full Review
Month: December 2024
Babygirl
Twenty-five years ago, Nicole Kidman starred in a sex drama where she played a married woman requesting a more fulfilling sexual experience from her husband. The movie had the distinction of taking place during ChristmasRead Full Review
The Brutalist
In The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet is attempting to craft an epic on par with the Great American Novels of the Twentieth Century. Like many epic tales, we are given a hero, and his life isRead Full Review
The Room Next Door
Last year, Pedro Almodóvar released his first ever film in English: a short film called Strange Way of Life, a queer-tinged western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as cowboys in the old West. Because it’sRead Full Review
Wicked
The orneriest members of the online film elite have made their feelings known about Wicked‘s lighting – or particularly, it’s backlighting. Never before have I seen a group of irony-pilled aesthetes get so hung up on theRead Full Review
Maria
Pablo Larraín makes remarkably interesting and unambiguously political films in his native Chile, but he’s most famous in the US for his now three biopics on Twentieth Century Women in Trouble. 2016’s Jackie explored Jacqueline KennedyRead Full Review
Nickel Boys
Not since Terrence Mallick’s The Tree of Life have I come across a film like Nickel Boys – a movie that is so unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before while taking the care and patience toRead Full Review
The Order
After the first election of Donald Trump, I found myself shocked by the sudden rise of fascists and neo-Nazis freely speaking their tirades of racism and hate without fear of derision. That was eight yearsRead Full Review
Oh, Canada
If the last three films of Paul Schrader have been defined by his Travis Bickle-like protagonists – scribbling furiously in their notebooks while voiceover expresses their philosophical and existential crises – then Oh, Canada is him going MishimaRead Full Review
Hard Truths
Writer-director Mike Leigh hasn’t been too shy to talk about about how difficult it has become for him to make movies these days. He mentions it in nearly any interview he gives, even during pressRead Full Review
Queer
Perhaps more than any other director working right now, Luca Guadagnino understands that fucking is one of humanity’s greatest motivators, dictating nearly every aspect of our lives, it’s consequences rippling forever through our relationships, ourRead Full Review