Glass Onion lacks all the essential elements of a good detective story: intriguing suspects, high stakes, and a deducible mystery.
Maximally cheesy Benoit Blanc joins an unlikeable array of 2D insta-era characters in an attempt to peel back the layers of the Glass Onion (so to speak). The decades-long friendship these characters have is completely implausible -- they treat each other like strangers and have nothing in common. Miles Bron and Cassandra Brand, two key members of the crew, are…
Turns out the dialectic is much, much better when it has a wrapper of comedic irreverence.
Totò & son take a surreal walk through Italy, accompanied by a talking crow who tells them the tale of two 13th century monks. These monks, played also by Totò & Davoli, are ordered by Saint Francis to convert the hawks and sparrows to Christianity.
As one of my co-watchers remarked, the climaxes of this medieval interlude are almost transcendently funny — in a film that…
The Ballad of Narayama opens with a sweeping aerial view of the eponymous, ice-white mountain. The viewer, however, is not permitted to bask simply in natural splendour; any uncomplicated reflection is disrupted by the juddering camera, leaving the viewer slightly disconcerted, umoored.
Such a theme runs throughout the film -- although we are permitted to see the beauty of rural 19th century Japanese life, we are never allowed to revel in it, provided as we are with constant reminders of…
The Irishman narrates his tale in a very particular Scorsesean setting, which, at the close of the film, we realise has seriously telescoped what we've just seen. Yet this, more than what he tells us, shines light on Frank's moral failures -- he barely mentions the silent women in his life who stayed by his side, or the union men he spent decades fighting for. The difficulty some have in following the narrative is surely intended to highlight these huge…
