Favorite films
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
Nothing in the vast spectrum of contemporary slop mediocrity could hope to fail as hard as this baffling disaster of a movie does. Camp in the most eminent of senses.
You know that part in Mann's Dr. Faustus where Kretschmar lectures about Beethoven's opus 111? That's pretty much how I feel about Holy Motors.
It's not an altogether new trick for a movie to progressively abrogate the formal and narrative assumptions that would allow you to make sense of it, effectively leaving you empty-handed and dazed in the end. But here Carax is neither pedantic nor scornful. Rather he makes love to you with such compassion that you are tenderly heartbroken as he undoes what you made together.
Looks like a masterpiece, sounds like a masterpiece, has the vibes of a masterpiece, is not a masterpiece.