There's a powerful scene in this film in which a young Jewish man sits across a table from a Palestinian woman and pleads with her to try to understand the historic suffering of his people.
"My people have been paying the price for your suffering for years," she solemnly replies (I'm paraphrasing from memory).
And that's the grim reality that this epic family saga aims to bring to life. The tragic HUMAN toll of Zionism on the Palestinian people, and…
EVA. FUCKING. VICTOR.
Remember that name because if there's any light or hope or justice left in thIs universe, she'll be a household name before the year's over. If Greta Gerwig and Phoebe Waller-Bridge made a baby, she'd probably grow up to be Eva Victor.
Literal GOOSEBUMPS while watching this as it suddenly dawned on me that I was lucky enough to be witnessing in Real Time the emergence of a truly singular and exciting new voice in cinema. Then…
CRITERION CHALLENGE 2025: Watch a film that would be your first choice in the Criterion Closet
"I haven't done anything to be proud of. I've just muddled through."
Most gay-themed films I watch these days tend to be "coming of age" stories that connect with my own childhood memories and "coming out" experiences as an older gay teen. It's rare to find a film that speaks this directly and maturely to my life RIGHT NOW as a gay man fast…
"No? Not ready to come out yet?"
Wish somebody would look at me the way Sal Mineo's Plato looks at James Dean's Jim in every single moment they're onscreen together.
God, what I wouldn't give for a leaked celebrity sex tape between those two!
Daddy Issues: The Movie? Bisexuality: The Movie?
This didn't hit quite as hard as I remembered it hitting the last time I saw this for an undergraduate film course nearly three decades ago.
The melodrama gets…
I think this might be the first film from Luca Guadagnino that left me feeling absolutely nothing at all.
"Hot on the outside, cold on the inside," the lead character says at one point. He's describing Baked Alaska, but could just as easily be talking about this film. Only one brief scene early-on brought the kind of intense, electric eroticism that I had expected from the rest of the film. Everything else was just so mind-numbingly boring and a real…
We've all had that one exaggeratedly eccentric friend who always shows up to every social gathering ready to play their role to perfection, but occasionally goes overboard out of a kind of self-conscious desperation to live up to the outrageous reputation that precedes them. Maybe you've even been that friend yourself?
This movie is THAT friend. And after a certain point I was just like okay, Yorgos, chill. We all know you like to be weird and provocative, but maybe…
