I was not prepared for the tone of this film; more The Swimmer than Taxi Driver, the black comedy reaches such heights that it is nearly surreal — its melodrama transfused with on-location New York grit is disturbing for its uncanniness. Joe comes off like a romantic comedy between two different toxic male types, and it’s only in fitful bursts — and in the violent beginning and legitimately shocking end that frame it — that it becomes the revenge film that its plot description suggests.
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Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland 1989
The cold open is everything you would want from a Little Nemo movie, evoking the whimsy and even the structure of the comic strip. It also suggests a kind of darker elaboration on Winsor McCay’s fantasy that is never fully delivered in the film that follows, except in the final battle sequence. The entire last act is reminiscent of the comics of Moebius, who was at one point involved in the production of Adventures in Slumberland. This section of the…
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Spawn 1997
This movie genuinely looks more and more like an Image comic book every day — Its sublimely ugly, once-bleeding-edge special effects are part of Spawn’s maximalist pleasure. Today, the unreality of the film’s CGI comes across as just another aspect of its total commitment to a brazenly cartoonish sensibility: no more or less preposterous than its practical props, which include guns resembling nothing that has ever existed except on the comics page, in the escalating silly arms race between Todd…
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Shortcomings 2023
An impeccably cast adaptation of Adrian Tomine’s 2007 graphic novel, Justin Min and Sherry Cola have especially hilarious chemistry. Tomine’s screenplay fleshes out the literary, perhaps overly elliptical tone of his original story in a way that is more satisfyingly dramatic, without becoming overly broad. The only slight misstep is in the ending, which uses an on-the-nose voice-over narration, paired with a montage revisiting all of the supporting characters, that summarizes the “moral” too tidily.
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