To laugh and to cry go hand in hand in life, and no one knows that better than Mike Leigh, who shines a light on the ways that we bury ourselves within, afraid to reveal our imperfections to the world. Sometimes, you have to laugh your way through the pain, and Secrets & Lies allows us to do that with these incredible characters: messy, flawed, human, and performed to perfection by this cast. Brenda Blethyn and Marianne Jean-Baptiste especially are deep wells of emotion.
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I Saw the TV Glow 2024
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
I’ve been itching for a second-watch of this one, and it just solidified everything I felt about it the first time. I found the intentionality that Schoenbrun placed into every frame and every line of dialogue.
The queer metaphor is way heavier than I even noticed before. It was so clear on this watch why Owen and Maddy became so invested in the fictional world of The Pink Opaque. Isabel and Tara are clearly the versions of themselves that Owen and…
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Naked 1993
An absolutely miserable watch that I’ve had a tough time of assessing fully since I finished it last night. In many ways, it’s Mike Leigh’s best. Naked is a nihilistic and atmospheric feat like nothing else in his filmography. David Thewlis’s performance as Johnny is also probably a career-best in Leigh’s filmography, which is chock full of brilliant, layered, nuanced performances. The screenplay, while not as gratifying as some of his others, is a philosophy-major’s wet dream as Johnny drones on and on in a way only a misogynistic tortured-genius type could.
Satisfying? No.
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Running on Empty 1988
River Phoenix was an actor wise beyond his years. Watching this really drove home what a monumental loss he was for cinema.
Lumet’s film doesn’t have to dig too deep to land its emotional blows. When you’ve got actors like Phoenix, the always-dependable Judd Hirsch, a remarkable Christine Lahti, and the unsung hero of the film, Martha Plimpton, you don’t really have to. What starts as a pretty basic set-up slowly blooms into something more profound. I was an emotional…
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The Holdovers 2023
imagine this:
me, Christmas Eve, wrapped in a warm blanket, a cup of hot morning coffee, turning on this movie and absolutely sobbing my eyes out at all the Da’Vine Joy Randolph scenes
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Longlegs 2024
sorry to say I really hated this :)
every “scary” moment, every performance (minus Maika who is innocent), every piece of scoring was so manufactured to ~CrEeP~ out the audience instead of letting the horror speak for itself.
just always found it to be PERFORMING horror instead of actually BEING horror, ya know what I mean???
Nic Cage really went to the Joaquin-Phoenix-in-the-Joker school of “crazy acting” didn’t he? His performance is such a huge misfire for me, throwing spaghetti at the “psycho” wall and hoping some of it sticks. And that also sums up how I feel about pretty much the entire film.
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