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The Exorcist III 1990
blatty the director acquits himself okay but the man’s a novelist at heart and for every striking image he manages to line up, there’s another ten minutes of interminable theological babble to be endured. say what you will about EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC but boorman’s formal acuity was never in question — he had a preternatural feel for how to frame and cut his images even as the material itself lapsed into outright incoherence. blatty’s workmanlike assemblage simply doesn’t compare. that…
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Days 2020
living in the material world
two concurrent lonelinesses intersect, culminating in a sequence of great eroticism and tenderness. that the encounter is transactional — just another human need mediated through market mechanisms — hardly dulls its emotional implications. as usual, tsai has a knack for tapping into the rhythms of a contemporary consciousness that entirely bypass questions of “good” or “bad”; it simply is. having just gone through a rather messy breakup, i found myself moved by the film’s gentle, meditative rhythms.…
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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…
