"One woman used up only 3 minutes, and another used three 2-hour tapes."
Absolutely immaculate filmmaking, not one dent to be seen anywhere. I was honestly terrified that a rewatch would strip it of its initial luster, but it did just the opposite. sex, lies and videotape is right at the top of my all-time faves, not just for its many formal achievements, but mostly because of how raw its capture of sex is, not as a mere physical act,…
Unbothered, unashamed, true to itself from the opening titles to the end credits' all-too-satisfying "Wake Up" needle drop: The Matrix Resurrections immediately feels like the most conceptually daring blockbuster of the past decade. It has absolutely no qualms in being this katana-sharp metatext that gleefully hacks away at the depressingly self-serving ouroboros state of current thought, not giving a single turd about elegance, coherence, or even its own fandom. If you wish to hold it up against the previous films,…
Just absolutely demolishing. Probably, the best work I've ever seen come out of the post-#MeToo era. Sometimes art shouldn't be a question. Sometimes art needs, demands even, to be a ten exclamation mark all-caps statement shouted as loudly and boldly as possible, even if to the guts of the very void. Jodie Comer gives one of the greatest performances I've ever seen out of anyone, in a role that demands so much out of someone I'm surprised she didn't just drop dead when the curtains rolled. What a work of subjective empathy, masterful from beginning to end.
I really can't recall the last time I saw a film this actively antagonizing, where every itty bitty decision feels put together with a combination of an ironic smirk and a protruding middle finger, both pointed straight at the audience. Even all the way through to the marketing and the trailers, Annette is possibly the biggest rug pull of Carax's career -- and that is saying something. Apart from the opening scene, this really isn't the quirky Sparks musical I…
Cinema through the meat-grinder. Where Crash saw the arrival of avenues conflating the human and the mechanical, Titane rides them out to their logical brick wall, all in a hail of mighty thunder. It's all pure commitment to the desecration of the body, to ripping it from the clutches of theory and abstraction into the realm of sheer physicality. Here, gender and purpose cease to exist, it's all just meat and bones anyway -- crash it, break it, cut it,…
