Favorite films
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
A few friends had described this as disappointing: unexpectedly ‘apolitical,’ ‘sentimental’ & co. & co. so I came to this ready to be unimpressed. It wasn’t hard, then, for the movie to surpass my depressed expectations. Even when the beats were predictable - of course a military checkpoint follows shots of youthful joy so fervent it looks like an advert for life under the Brazilian dictatorship - I was compelled enough. And, whilst I was oddly unmoved by the brutality of the…
As visually joyless and unbeautiful as Pansy’s life! Hard Truths was a kick to the nuts of my emotions.
In general I found the writing, editing and performances a bit hammy or ‘stagey,’ like actors were playing to the back of the house rather than the intimacy of contemporary filmed naturalism.
Also a fun watch pre going to (re)watch Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, which is also a lot about fear, some anger, loneliness and mundanity ft. older women. Something about the…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
It’s funny that, for a film about an architectural style associated with function, rationalism, social housing, and 20th century modernity, The Brutalist has such a deeply 18th century, Romantic presentation of modernist architecture’s story. Corbet’s film is all about the sublime, the inexpressible, the singular talent: the individual ego expressed through art. (And, speaking of ego, it’s hard not to imagine Corbet saying to producers just what Toth says to his project manager: ‘if you cut here [gestures at the top],…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
My fave Lanthimos so far (that I’ve seen*).
*obviously NOT JUDGING THE ONES I HAVE NOT SEEN
Part Angela Carter in her surrealism days, part Frankenstein (no shit!), part something else entirely silly. Like all the other Yorgos Lanthimos films I’ve seen, Poor Things takes a fairly clear and critical conceit then stretches and bends it to its absurd extremities.
Stray thoughts and observations:
- why was the woman she met on the ship also so ‘unconventional’? Does it matter?…