Thief is really such a fully formed Mann vision right from the jump. The meticulousness of his characters, Mann's interest in their labor that draws me in as well, and an extraordinary explicit (but no less powerful for it) critique of the exploitative nature of wage labor via Chicago crime story - this one has some real highlights. It's shaggy in some places, especially in all of its first act hand-waving about much of Frank's past and his relationship with…
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Mickey 17 2025
A pretty good movie that sits firmly on a lower tier of Bong's work with his other English language releases. It's obviously still fun, but maybe the least structurally sound screenplay of his I've seen yet with a kind of baffling ending that only makes sense to me if I classify the movie as a comedy and work backwards from there. Pattinson is very good, the rest of the cast is fine to okay, there's many good jokes - ya know, it's Bong, it's still good! Just pretty thin blockbuster Bong, which is better than none.
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Two Girls on the Street 1939
The films strongest moments are its early portrayals of solidarity (in variously queer, gendered, and class forms), but it becomes increasingly clear that the film's real focus is on those who would betray those solidarities for the dream of material wealth and comfort. Which is an interesting conceit, but the fact that those betrayals are embodied by two women abused and exploited by a viciously patriarchal, classist society without spending much time asking why women in these positions might aspire to such material security sours the whole endeavor for me in favor of forced melodrama and cynicism.
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The Zone of Interest 2023
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
A genuinely unique and new depiction of the Holocaust that manages to bring the horrors of the Shoah into the present more than any other fictional depiction I've seen before. Glazer's extraordinarily rigorous, restrained formal experiment is really compelling; this is a story of the commandant of Auschwitz' family, but the story is not the story of their domestic and familial drama, or at least not in and of itself. Every aspect of their lives is examined directly in relation…
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