my new london cinema discovery, the ICA, has a Rivette season that just started and is running until the start of june. given i’m leaving for travelling in a month’s time, I’ll unfortunately miss most of the movies I really want to see (which aren’t often screened in the UK - this is the first Rivette retrospective in 18 years) so I thought I better head over to catch at least one of the showings.
Anyway, I had a fairly…
Really hoping to love this (travelling to Mumbai in a few weeks and wanted to watch a few films set in the countries I’m going to).
Unfortunately, this film was very so-so and didn’t possess the “city-as-character” feeling to which positive reviews were alluding.
None of the storyline or character decisions really moved me; uninspiring storyline led to a fairly bleh ending. I feel like they really wanted to make the main protagonist thoughtful and nuanced but for a lot…
Completely sublime filmmaking. Everyone should see this film. [yes, including readers who have moved continents over the weekend.] I’ll spare the short lecture about why I’m usually so reticent to give 5-star ratings - but this is the first non-rewatch to which I have given a perfect rating in 4.5 YEARS!!!
I don’t want to start with plot-spoiling analysis in the review as I just think everyone should see it next week when it opens… I will say that I found…
One of the best movies so far this decade, The Holdovers is a period film truly inseparable from its setting. Countless tiny interactions within David Hemingson's (debut feature film!) script appear to convey the poignancy of its principal characters' lives - in ways that never feels over-written or over-explanatory. One has a profound sense of characters' existences both before and after the movie's timespan, in subtle deft writing. Razor sharp dialogue ("What is this? The Nuremberg trials?", "Life is like…
