Noah Thompson’s review published on Letterboxd:
We love each other very much.
If Marion Cotillard was my fiance, I would perform musical cunnilingus on her too. The Bo Burnham biopic, with John Mulaney chocolate sauce and Max Landis rainbow sprinkles. In short, an uproarious, brilliantly original musical dramatic epic about love and people to love lost by a man so wrapped up in self-deprecation that he destroys everything. It's about as "theatrical" of a cinematic experience as you would desire from Sparks. It's a great idea to talk about those guys. Ron and Russell Mael are two of the first people to be visually shown within Annette, as well as the first people to receive onscreen credit for their work even before Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. This is absolutely because this is as much a product of their sensibilities as much as it is a work from director Leos Carax. The true mark of what makes this a great movie is how I think about how relatively straightforward the actual plot and events of this film are, yet it is in the presentation of these events, how every individual scene feels so purposeful and wholly unique in how it is constructed to entrap you, that the film presents itself as something so singular. This could have only come from Carax and Sparks, which makes it a must-see experience for anyone, even if based on audience and critical reception, it'll be a crapshoot about whether or not you actually like it. I will add, and really bring focus to this, that to go about reducing Annette to a "weird" or "provocative" movie would be to do its magic tricks a disservice. At the core of this is drama and emotion that feels deeply honest and enveloping. Imagine my shock when maybe the two most emotional scenes of this movie (beyond its pitch-black ending) involves a string-less marionette floating into the air and that one guy with the bowl cut and "Dreamworks face" smirk from The Big Bang Theory conducting an orchestra in one shot. Attempting to be vague otherwise about moments and performance quirks that are so good about this because it's worth going into it knowing little so whatever feelings or thoughts you have with it are yours. Pretty damn happy that for me, this experience went as well as it could have. Loved it, will keep loving it, will keep listening to its songs, will revisit.
9/10
