Now presenting, Man With a Movie Camera…
🏆 Winner of Samcrom’s 1,000th Review Contest 🏆
There exists a mechanical instrument that allows one to peel away strips of time and control them. This instrument, understood simply, is a tool of transcription or recording. It captures light-rays. Understood on a slightly more involved level, it becomes apparent that the tool does not simply capture light, but time. To be precise: it transmutes time into a material strip of frames, which can then be…
Oh man, where do I start? Persona defies interpretation; in fact, one of the many themes of the film is the very struggle with interpretation. This film has so many different ways to interpret it that you could watch it hundreds of times and see something new each time. (it blows my mind how complex Persona manages to be in just 85 minutes). At the core of the film— the thread that runs through it all— is duality. The duality of things…
The most generous description of Ash would be to say it is Ridley Scott in the vein of Alien and a Panos Cosmatos’ cosmic aesthetic, blended with the blades of B-movie body horror and excessive spurts of gore. But Ash finds itself under-calibrated to Alien’s minimal efficiency and over-calibrated to Mandy’s already maximal overload.
To begin your story with “Protagonist Waking Up With Amnesia” is to immediately wade into the sticky seas of cliche; any further steps will need…
Just as the overly sentimental becomes treacly and mawkish, so too does the overly dour become contrived and off-putting. The Girl with the Needle is one such example of a relentless excess of misery, a story that curdles in its own depthlessly bitter pool, with characters defined only by the poverty and brutality imposed upon them. The compositions are careful and the imagery is well-composed— but in service of what? The exacting cinematography almost works against the film’s desire for immersive realism, and its wallowing in hardship certainly does more work to alienate than involve.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
The ultimate capitalistic fantasy: taste the pure possibility of the multiverse and then return to dutifully do your taxes. That is only one of the ways this film espouses the pernicious ideology of capitalism; such values are embedded in the very fabric of its conceptually inconsistent multiverse. The maximalist excess, the superficial thought, the rush of spectacle, the triumph of the individual— these are the implicit and explicit outcomes of the capitalist system, and also the driving forces of the…
Watching this film was like trying to scale an immense glacier. A cold and distant and repetitive ascent. Scrabbling along a slick surface, severely steep, nearly insurmountable, no handholds or footholds, nowhere to find purchase or access. The struggle of a climb against a surface that closes itself off, a story that actively resists itself. Along an incline so steep it's nearly vertical, with only the most minimal of forward momentum. The film is an arduous endurance test: nearly four…
