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The Brutalist 2024
The second half isn’t quite as good as the first, but still, what an achievement. Filmed with the texture and tone of Gordon Willis’ finest hours in the 1970s, and featuring the best and most exciting film score in over a decade—a shifting, mercurial thing where late romanticism gives way to early modernism and hints of shimmering pre-minimalism and timbral hints of free jazz, giving way at last to new wave-inspired synths in the epilogue—this is a true American epic in every sense. Worth the hype and as good as they say. It’s worth seeing on the biggest screen you can.
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Pain & Gain 2013
This is vulgar auteurism’s finest hour.
By 2013, Michael Bay had spent two decades crafting undeniably skillful but nonetheless crass, garish, over-indulgent, and consummately nihilistic movies for an audience he clearly has always held in contempt. What makes Bay the Ur-vulgar auteur isn’t just the cognitive dissonance between the obvious skill on display and the lowbrow schlock that skill is in service in, but also the clear and abiding disdain he holds for his target audience. Michael Bay hates you…
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Alien: Romulus 2024
Alien: Romulus does a lot right: it’s got the look, the feel, and the sound of the franchise exactly right. It’s genuinely scary and genuinely thrilling. It’s gnarly. It’s got a new Weird Guy, and it’s a really good Weird Guy.
It does one thing really, really, really wrong: you may have heard reports that it takes a cue from Rogue One and goulishly digitally resurrects Ian Holm, but that’s underselling it: the deepfake technology used in Romulus looks orders of magnitude worse…
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Nosferatu 2024
I’ll probably edit this review later on to add more, but just as a placeholder: I loved this. Robert Eggers really has my interests at heart, both when it comes to historical drama and gothic horror. I was cagey about the color palette and lighting when the trailer released, but it works wonderfully here, feeling both indebted to Werner Herzog’s 70s European sensibilities and the blue and sepia colored cells of F. W. Murnau. Lily Rose-Depp was surprisingly great here, sporting a much better English accent than anything her father ever did. Bill Skarsgard is unrecognizable in shape, in voice, and performance alike. It’s truly extraordinary.
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