A rich and funny coming-of-age story that feels fresh and timely—distinctively stylized and presented, yet it never looses its heartfelt connection with the audience.
Izaac Wang offers a nuanced, fully realized performance that belies his years and signals a promising future.
What initially seems like a small-scale film is brimming with rich emotions, culminating in a deeply moving and pitch-perfect ending that proves Leigh’s mastery and confidence in his storytelling.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers a monumental performance, anchoring the film and imbuing it with lasting impact.
Phantom Thread is delightful in all of it’s fastidious construction, a Paul Thomas Anderson film through and through that revels in details and slow build-ups. Krieps and Day-Lewis are both wonderful, sharing a great chemistry at times burning with plain desire, at others mercurial and wicked. Through its duration, the film remains fully immersing, the mise-en-scène rich, the laughs deserved, and the final plot twist narrative enhancing and thought-provoking.
The Revenant is far from another entry in Iñárritu’s so-called brand of “misery porn”. The plight on screen is primal and attuned with the period, a blood-stained vision of a conflict as old as time, man versus nature, but also of men’s wondrous ability to prevail in spite of overwhelming odds. The monumentally beautiful natural tableaus, stitched together by the director and Emmanuel Lubezki, make the untouched future America a character of its own, one that acts as intermittent release…
