Kristen Stewart multilayered performance here continues her trajectory as one of the great actors of the modern era. She alone elevates this film from a B to a B+, selling Lou’s exhaustion with her own fury. The film wears its noir sensibilities on its sleeves, but is less successful when it reaches for the surreality of David Lynch. This is an instance of a great director, a great script, and a great cast not quite reaching greatness, but nevertheless making something far more compelling than what usually graces our screens.
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Mulholland Drive 2001
Its disparate storylines speak to its origin as a television pilot, and just as they intersect into something that threatens unity as most films demand, Lynch throws the board over. A unified story is, for Lynch, a comforting lie. A complete story plays with our fear, our anxieties, the parts of ourselves we repress, and then puts them away safely so that we can pretend we've confronted them. Lynch doesn't want us to forget. Lynch knows that our dreams as just as terrible as our nightmares, and there is no greater place for dreaming than Hollywood.
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Wicked 2024
It's genuinely wonderful to see the first Hollywood musical in a long time that does not appear to be ashamed to be a musical. But Chu seems uncomfortable behind the camera in the musical numbers; it moves around lazily, lacking motivation, perhaps in some vein attempt to inject dynamism into the visual landscape. Mostly, the film holds up based on the fact that Wicked – while being a rather messy and tonally discordant story – is charming and funny, but…
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Videodrome 1983
Saw this at the BFI on the big screen, which was the perfect way to see it. A disgusting, nasty piece of work in the best possible way. The film trembles with both glee and anxiety at the kind of humanity that is emerging from a world on the cusp of digitality. It refuses to present this as a story of repression, but instead as a productive moment of becoming, even if what the world is becoming may be more horrible than it has ever been. Even someone as awful as James Woods doesn't manage to undermine the power of this film.
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