Notoriously released and abandoned the same week as Goodfellas; like the moody, morose, boozy, Irish-American shadow of Scorsese’s brash swagger. A film that works best as a particular kind of dirge – for a city that keeps on feeling less like a community, for a neighborhood that’s losing out to capital, for old bonds that feel lost to the useless hunger of individualist ambition. “They’re kicking out the Irish to build those yuppie nests!” A film so thoroughly bound to…
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Anora 2024
All this big, bold, freewheeling screwball energy, a little bit too in love with its own excesses (“It’s a bender, yeah”). Madison’s ferocious performance can never really overcome the fact that Ani is very much a macho creation; some kind of foul-mouthed girl-boss fantasia borne out of a man’s deep and earnest love of the b-movie tradition. Though, of course, it all ultimately comes down to what that man wants us to think she’s thinking in that wintry eruption of…
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Friends and Strangers 2021
The best new young-people-going-through-vaguely-defined-shit film I’ve seen in years; if Vaughan largely leaves the reasons for Ray and Alice’s stuntedness – professional, romantic, emotional – only hinted at, numerous casual reminders of Australia’s aboriginal and colonial origins point to some more widespread malaise amid all the self-indulgent millennial comfort. Past failures that haven’t been fully reckoned with, future roadmaps not yet drawn, a present dominated by so many forgotten histories, useless digressions, missed cues, and false starts. “We’ll just have…
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Titane 2021
Clearly, I’m in the minority here, but it’s the sort of transgressive provocation I just find incredibly dull, if not flat-out useless. As with Raw before it, the sensationalist genre trappings just become a way for Ducournau to avoid having to try to say anything about any emotional depths she might’ve wandered into. Indeed, literally nothing of either Alexia’s narrative trajectory or Vincent’s emotional awakening would change at all if her baby had been made of flesh and blood instead…
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