Almost hilariously grim. Definitely an ode to those Bergman films where his chamber drama style swerved into unabashed horror, like Hour of the Wolf or even Through a Glass Darkly, while early sections pull strongly from Murnau and Lang. But not as dread-inducing as it ought to be, the somewhat generic soundtrack contributing to an uneven execution of the false promise of the opening sequence (a panoply of screaming faces in the dark, transmogrifying and elasticating as they're overcome by…
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
-
Raymond Carver: Dreams Are What You Wake Up From 1989
Very very fine television programming and - like its subject and his writing - quiet, sad, and occasionally weird. The soundtrack sounded very familiar, not least since a lot of these BBC Omnibus documentaries from the 1980s liked overlaying their interstitials with blues guitar, and I was very gratified to find Leo Kottke's name in the credits.
Translated from by
Popular reviews
More-
Blonde 2022
To regard this as a film about Marilyn Monroe is retrograde. This is a film about images, image-making, reproducibility, parasocial sickness from the perspective of the object of desire. This is not a biopic, but a biopsy of a Marilyn Monroe, and her conflict with Norma Jean. De Armas portrays the Gemini's eternal curse to desire, create, tire of, and finally destroy the facsimiles that exist of herself. It's not simply her mother's paranoid schizophrenia she inherits, but the idea…
Translated from by -
The Brutalist 2024
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
I really like this, I'm just trying to locate what I think was missing in the second half. I don't know if THAT scene was necessary; not necessarily because of its suddenness or content, but rather it's direct incarnation of the phrase, 'He fucked me over.' There's a lot of riveting, powerful, and technically accomplished elements in part 2. But, it never archieves or follows through on part 1, which is a masterful harmony of contextualisation of Laszlo's individual experience…
Translated from by
