Antonioni meets Tarkovsky meets Kieślowski, that’s me.
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The Set-Up 1949
Across cinema history, extremely few feature films have been adapted from poems, and the number of films based on 20th century poems, specifically, is minuscule—perhaps fifty in total. The poems are usually epics or other narrative poems, and substantial liberties are often taken in adaptation. For better or worse (mostly better), Robert Wise’s The Set-Up, based on poet/screenwriter Joseph Moncure March’s eponymous 1920s narrative poem, is no exception.
With its syncopated, often anapestic rhyming couplets, March’s six-part, book-length narrative poem The…
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Red Rooms 2023
Red Rooms slaps most 2020s films across the face with its fresh edge such that other films appear derivative or weak in comparison. I wish I could go back and resee this film the first time—lights out and volume up, phone out of sight.
This film—the third feature by Québécois director Pascale Plante, whose first two films, Les faux tatouages (Fake Tattoos, 2017) and Nadia, Butterfly (2020), are little-known just now—is modern and whip-tight. The opening courtroom scene might be…
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A Complete Unknown 2024
The next time someone yaps that the biopic is an intrinsically stale award-bait genre of films that mostly shouldn’t exist, show the complainant A Complete Unknown. This biopic has soul. It moved me powerfully, and I was in tears in several of Timothée Chalamet’s song performances, beginning with his first—Bob Dylan’s “Song to Woody,” performed early in the film for Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).
A Complete Unknown is getting cynically critiqued and even dismissed, confoundingly.…
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Megalopolis 2024
Why major studios passed on producing Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (he ultimately backed it with $120 million of his own funds) isn’t tough to discern. The film is clearly (visibly) an extravagant project that would never have been able to recoup expenses, simply owing to how outlandish, discombobulated, and disjointed it is. Coppola’s dialogue is also subpar and, oftentimes, woefully lousy, with laughable lines (“Lying little slut!”, “Listen, bitch! You and I oughta have an understanding… Okay?”, etc.) surrounding plain clichés…
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Joker: Folie à Deux 2024
I’m surprised that this is the follow-up film to Joker (2019) that director Todd Phillips and Scott Silver co-wrote and made (and with Warner Bros.’s backing). This musical-qualitied courtroom drama (not a thriller film, action film, superhero film, full-on musical film, etc.) delivers restraint, and then more restraint—this is bones of a story progression with rarely any meat that the viewer wants.
The viewer of Joker: Folie à Deux wants protagonist Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) to miraculously develop as a…
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Coup de Chance 2023
Engaging. Somewhat of a companion piece to Allen's Match Point (2005). Exquisite musical selections surrounding the motif of Nat Adderley’s version of Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island,” and the stabilized handheld in the apartment scenes works well. Good costuming, and the warm, rich palette complements the subject matter and characters. The ending is a bit abrupt.
Somewhat ambiguous but certainly intentional and up for interpretation, given the messiness around Allen in later years, are the toy train set and the painting (up…
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