Letterboxd — Your life in film

A film with almost nothing to say, constantly pretending otherwise and misstepping completely in almost all of those rare moments it does decide to make any point at all across its 3 hours of hyper-cut, score-drenched montage in place of actual script or scenes. 

And perhaps even worse, the film seems to realize many of its mistakes and opts simply to have a character hang a lampshade on them as if that changes anything. 

The addressing of the film’s poorly…

The action is cranked for maximum beef, as we expect from Cruise and McQuarrie. On that level I was more than satisfied.

But I'm used to these stories having a believable sense of scale and stakes. I don't need them to be Shakespeare, but this is the first one that tries to tackle a thorny contemporary anxiety—the rapid acceleration of AI and algorithmic truth creation—and then falls on its ass. It feels very baby boomer airport fiction.

Worse yet, the…

Really very good but I wish I knew going in that it didn’t end. Kinda just annoyed me when the To Be Continued popped up. Which probably speaks to how invested I was in the story but damn. It just ends up feeling like two thirds of a movie. I loved those two thirds but…gimme a little closure! Coming fresh off seeing the dreadful Fast X cliffhanger ending last week certainly didn’t help. 

Otherwise, very good. Manages to both be…

for a film about classical music, directly drawing inspiration from bernstein's own democratising performances of mahler, it's remarkable how passionless and stale the spaces and interactions in this film feel. and yet that is precisely the film's strength

the world it portrays is devoid of energy and instead we see the life tár has constructed; a world of petty politics, procedure, and the abuse she can exercise within it. everyone and everything feels suffocated by tár whose own narcissism and…