I don’t know, I think maybe “fast and steady” would win the race a little more often.
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The Flash 2023
What a weird, fascinating specimen of a movie, nearly crushed under the weight of so many extracurricular issues and somewhat heroically emerging victorious against them.
First of all, the separate-the-art-from-the-artist debate gets fresh chum with Ezra Miller's dazzling performance -- they're an off-camera mess of a person: an abusive, violent, grooming, cult-leading thief with serious mental health issues. But on camera they're working out a lot of this shit through emotionally charged scenes of bottomless humanity. Let's look at the…
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Vanilla Sky 2001
Exists in a perfect dialectic with EYES WIDE SHUT -- the Kubrick text not only helps unpack this one, but this focuses some things about the Kubrick as well. There are even visual callbacks (Alicia Witt walking backwards seductively through LE is a straight up rip) as well as David's motto, which -- as he says twice at his birthday party in the first act -- is "living the dream." People keep telling him to wake up, but he has…
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Here 2024
A ghastly abomination so mawkish and feeble that it threatens the very legacies of Zemeckis, Hanks, and Wright. Not too long ago I was beating the auteurist drum for Zemeckis, whose ALLIED was wrongfully ignored and remains one of the great romantic dramas of the 2010s: effortlessly skillful in every aspect of its direction and storytelling. This is quite the opposite -- a tone-deaf stage play that is so keen on using graphic novel templates like frames within frames that…
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The Firm 1993
I really don't like John Grisham. I think he's a terrible writer, both in style and in story. And virtually every movie made from his books is starting at such a massive disadvantage that only geniuses can make them remotely interesting -- which is why it's a minor miracle this one doesn't suck. Pollack is capable of some truly romantic camera moves and he has patience with his characters. The supporting cast is having a field day, especially Gary Busey…
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Mission: Impossible 1996
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
It's all about the scene in the third act when Ethan and Jim reunite and have a drink together. Jim is trying to convince Ethan that Kittridge is the mole, not knowing Ethan already figured out it was Jim because of the Drake Hotel bible. So Ethan, having the upper hand, narrates a flashback where he pretends to realize how Kittridge did it, all for Jim's benefit -- meanwhile, DePalma's visuals tell a different story: the way Ethan is seeing…
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Devs 2020
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Even if this show didn't feature what is probably the single worst lead performance of any major prestige drama in the last 25 years (but it does: Sonoya Mizuno is deeply, all-encompassingly terrible in a way it's hard to fathom, episode after episode), it would still be a failure of ideas. ANNIHILATION is starting to feel more and more like an anomaly; its clever sci-fi concept had the courage to perform an existential autopsy of the human condition without pulling…
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