A complex look at family bonds and addiction that offers no tidy answers. Its tragic peak is when Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Sadie, sings Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back.” She’s a raw nerve, naked and flayed in her pain. She takes a song of sad, corny nostalgia and uses it to reveal a hole in her soul. Sadie talks, howls, screeches, and whispers the lyrics, like she’s sifting through the layers of her own darkness. As a revelation of character,…
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Close 2022
This film’s story is a total heartbreaker; it’s existence is cause for elation. A young filmmaker has given us a portrait of platonic male intimacy expressed in imaginative play and casual touch. Of course, it slams headfirst into the aggressive teenage rituals of gender conformity. But before it dims, it’s pure radiance.
Other directors (Zhao, Greengrass, Andrea Arnold among them) have successfully collaborated with non-professionals; Lukas Dhont goes further, centering his highly emotional drama on young Eden Dambrine’s face.…
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A Slipping Down Life 1999
Some of Lili Taylor’s best work from the 1990s has limited or no availability on U.S. streaming. Sadly, it’s easy to find her being ill-served by the shitty ‘99 Haunting remake and this mess.
She’s not the problem here, though it’s tough to see how she expected to make any sense of her character, Evie. The film centers chiefly on Evie’s personal growth, but that assumes that spontaneously carving a guy’s name into your forehead with broken glass is not…
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The Company of Wolves 1984
A reimagining of folk legends and faerie tales with sex elevated from subtext to text. Wearing a red riding-hood, Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson, then about 13) has desire and smarts; even when she plays into distressed-damsel tropes, it’s with a knowing curiosity, her eyes alert. She’d been warned that men can have wolves inside by her Granny, (Lansbury, chirpily relating tales of murder).
Director Neil Jordan wrote in close collaboration with feminist writer Angela Carter. Their script is sly and barbed…
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Babylon 2022
Robbie kills it, and Jean Smart skillfully rescues the pompous thesis statement that she’s forced to speak. So much for the good news…
1. Chazelle indulges his fascination with high-functioning addicts and violent egomaniacs, milking them as spectacle for, easily, 95% of the three hours. Then he trots out the “insight” that it’s a long, soulless road to a tragic dead end. It’s like getting a “Just Say No” lecture from a coke dealer.
2. He attempts a “statement” about…
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You Won't Be Alone 2022
First up, this isn’t a horror film. It’s more of a meditation on existence, sex, gender, love, and the cycle of life, albeit one that happens to involve a hideous, seemingly ageless witch with black claws and a taste for blood.
It doesn’t have a horror film’s pacing either; it flows dreamily. When the transitions between sequences involve some bloodshed, mostly we just see the aftermath.
Instead, the tone is pastoral, the voiceover that of someone never taught proper language…
