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The Fabelmans 2022
Pretty stunning — Spielberg examines authentic pain with such acuity and vulnerability that you could be forgiven for missing how adroitly he stages his actors in 1:85. The narcissistic hagiography basically justifies itself in real time. Makes sense that his recreations of his childhood 8mm films are embellished with better coverage than they actually had. After all, this is America’s most successful populist filmmaker shaping his own creation myth. This is how he wants to be remembered, a sort of…
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Emily the Criminal 2022
The class politics feel rather studied and dutiful, as if someone read an Atlantic piece about the millennial gig economy and devised a narrative around it. Sure, why not! Stylistically, this is about as impoverished as they come but Plaza basically makes the whole thing worth it. Turns out she’s a rather excellent dramatic actor, capable of playing venom and vulnerability with similar ease. There’s always interesting decisions being made even when her character’s mechanical trajectory fails to fully convince.…
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Nomadland 2020
cinema of moral concern. reminded me a lot of my peers' short films when i was at NYU — humanistic, handheld, more interested in tastefully naturalistic performances than any sort of formalism. it's a movie entirely shorn of rough edges. zhao's animating sensibility seems to be a sort of apolitical curiosity, her camera framing her subjects in medium close ups that close off any suggestion that these people's pain and marginalization could be the result of larger social forces. it’s…
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Bo Burnham: Inside 2021
burnham never met a punchline he couldn’t thrice annotate to ensure us that he's as in on the joke as we are. maybe there's something clever about that but it mostly just made me wish for braver, more confrontational comedy. who needs all that self-reflexive scaffolding? flashes of brilliance in burnham's bubblegum pop formalism (certainly blows emerald fennell's out of the water!) and as with EIGHTH GRADE, he proves himself a talented mimic but that doesn't change the fact that…
