Suspicious of its own likability but unwilling to raise its voice.
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Our Body 2023
OUR BODY starts out calm and clinical and turns increasingly personal and engaged with mortality. Initially, surgery is portrayed at a distance, shown through monitors. Imagery like a giant pipe giving off vapor is more sci-fi than body horror. If that's a genre the documentary becomes adjacent to, it deals directly with very difficult material movies, even other docs, usually sanitize or approach through metaphor. Few films are this utterly unconcerned with male spectators and our ideas about women's bodies.…
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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm 2020
The popular idea that comedy needs to “punch up” is too simplistic. It’s not always easy to figure out who has real power – the small army of cis male comics who think transphobia is the height of free thought are rather confused about it – or how to use humor to criticize Karens roaming Wal-Mart screaming at anyone with a mask on or empty female Instagram influencers without buying into sexist attitudes. (Look at how badly jokes about Britney…
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The French Dispatch 2021
The Wes Anderson backlash has been going on for years now, and I'm not trying to jump on it with my reaction to THE FRENCH DISPATCH. While Anderson's made several great films, his latest displays his worst instincts. And "display" is the right word - his framing places actors like elements of an art installation rather than people with believable inner lives. For a film so heavily worked over, it's astonishingly devoid of passion - the New Yorker (and James…
