Monkey Man is an underdog about an underdog. Abandoned by Netflix, sequestered by Covid, and gutted of its budget, the film’s production history is as scrappy and resilient as its hero. Maybe that’s why Dev Patel, as action star and debut director, performs both roles so well.
As the former, he uses his own body as adeptly as his camera. From the beginning, Patel’s lanky, gangly physique sets him apart from the glittering Mumbai elites as well as the hardened…
I stubbornly maintain that Denis Villeneuve’s Dune could—and should—have been told in one entry. But after watching a first film that contained nothing but set-up for the next, I hoped at least that Part Two would offer the thrills that Part One did not.
Well, it does and it doesn’t. What it mostly offers is more evidence for my one-movie vision. Yes, we finally get to see the plot advance to its actual climax, yet it crawls there so slowly…
I once watched a TED talk from a professional model whose thesis was, if you can believe it, that looks aren’t everything. And she convinced me. She spoke, eloquently and candidly, about the deception of makeup, about the racism of beauty standards, and about her ambivalence towards her own career. She even acknowledged that there were men who, growing up poor or Black or brown, possessed less privilege than she did.
While her presentation was not as riotously funny, edgy,…
(This review is for all four short films—which are really just a single anthology film, unreasonably split into four separate items on Netflix.)
Posting this review on Letterboxd feels out of place. Shouldn’t I be logging it on Goodreads? Is this not just an audiobook attached to a film?
I believe that Wes Anderson has been working up to this moment for his entire career. The Royal Tenenbaums aped, vaguely, the postmodern family saga of Infinite Jest. The Grand Budapest…
