Overview of the fraught relationship between censorship and US pop starts scrappy (disaffected narration, ragbag talking heads, misspelling Bieber) but gets notably stronger, not to mention far funnier, as it gets onto all things Satanic panic. What now to make of the unlikely mid-Eighties alliance between Dee Snider, John Denver and Frank Zappa, or the fact the one Madonna song Tipper Gore and her allies took up arms against was *"Dress You Up"*? At some point, Chris Morris seems to…
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O Brother, Where Art Thou? 2000
A sunny crowdpleaser: a few songs, a few laughs, an upbeat finale to send us all out beaming. Though one early setpiece involves a river baptism, the searching spiritual inquiries of 2009's "A Serious Man" were still some years away; for now, the Coens would wind up what was a breakthrough decade doing what makes them - and us - happy. Hanging out with character actors, first and foremost: Michael Badalucco as a Baby Face Nelson who hates cows nearly…
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Tenet 2020
The film that confirms Nolan no longer has any interest in human beings beyond assets on a poster or dots on a diagram... Visually and spiritually grey, it's too terse to relax and have a moment's fun with its premise; it's a caper for shut-ins, which may not stop it from becoming a runaway smash.
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Beginning 2020
Strikingly composed and rehearsed: it has to be, given the nature of some of those atrocities. Yet like a lot of films by young filmmakers who've seen a lot of films (and a lot of the New Extreme Cinema, in particular), it appears, scene by scene, utterly removed from life as it's actually experienced by real, non-movie, flesh-and-blood people; from first frame to last, we're watching terrible things happening to crash-test-dummy characters in one of those rigorously self-sealed art-movie vacuums.
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