Fully deserving of its Best Picture Oscar and Palme d’Or wins, this neorealist farce about a young stripper who lets her guard down when faced with the prospect of a fairy tale marriage to the son of a Russian oligarch is an entertaining fusion of the escalating chaos and fast-paced dialogue of 1930’s screwball comedies and the gritty exploitation of 1970’s Hollywood, featuring an almost Scorsesian portrayal of obscene wealth and hedonism, while still providing a thoroughly humanist glimpse into…
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Nimona 2023
In a futuristic world built on a medieval social hierarchy, a low-born knight is falsely accused of a crime and teams up with a shape-shifting young girl in order to prove his innocence. This adaptation of N.D. Stevenson’s webcomic-turned-graphic novel deviates significantly from the source material, but retains enough of its allegorical power and puckish irreverence, both perfectly embodied by its thankfully unchanged titular character, to keep its head above the generic action sequences and predictable emotional beats that threaten…
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Asterix the Gaul 1967
Decided to revel in some nostalgia by introducing my kid to one of my earliest cultural touchstones, but almost skipped this entry because I remembered it being the weakest. That assessment still stands: it’s basically a beat-by-beat retelling of the first Asterix album (that’s what us limp-wristed Europeans call our fancy non-stapled comic books), for better or for worse, since not everything that works on the printed page translates equally well to the screen. But it does make for a…
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Nosferatu 2024
Considering the fact that Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” is one of the most adapted novels in movie history, it’s virtually impossible for me not to compare this version to its many cinematic antecedents, some of which are among my most cherished films of all time. And while it doesn’t quite reach the levels of the F. W. Murnau original’s silent, expressionist dread, or the dreamlike intensity of my personal favorite, Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre”, I still found it a worthwhile…
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