No film at the Venice Film Festival not called “Don’t Worry Darling” has attracted such morbid fascination as Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe not-a-biopic, “Blonde.” Turns out that “morbid” qualifier is soft, to say the least: to call “Blonde” relentless would be about as immense an understatement as one can conjure of a movie that subjects its lead, Ana de Armas’ fictionalized Monroe, to two hours and forty-seven minutes of unending sexual torture, leering voyeurism, and devastating dehumanization. 

READ MORE: Venice Film Festival Preview: 16 Must-See Films To Watch

Much has already been made about the X-ratedness of it all, but god, this is — by design — soul-sapping stuff, leaving you bloodied and brutalized.

Continue reading ‘Blonde’ Review: Andrew Dominik’s Fictionalized Biopic Of Marilyn Monroe Is A Relentless, Brutal Statement On Celebrity [Venice] at The Playlist.

Heavy on Loachian social realism and undergirded by the intensity and heavy stakes of a Safdie Brothers flick, Juan Diego Botto’s gritty eviction thriller “On the Fringe” — produced by Penélope Cruz, who also lends her name to the billing sheet — makes for hard-hitting stuff. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival today in the Orrizonti section, here’s a slice of agitprop that feels as timely as ever, with the energy crisis surging across Europe, the costs of living rocketing from shore to shore, and society’s most marginalized left to pick up the tab. 

Anyone with half a heart and half a brain will be quickly won over by its interweaving stories, following three different people in the same Spanish city living under the cold, foreboding shadow of red-stamp eviction notices: though a little baggy in the second act, the first and final thirty-minutes are appropriately earnest and affecting.

Continue reading ‘On The Fringe’ Review: Hot-Button Eviction Thriller Starring Penélope Cruz Sticks Up A Righteous Finger At Landlords [Venice] at The Playlist.

With its abundance of flickery grain, exceedingly credible period production, and eminently authentic ensemble, UK filmmaker Georgia Oakley’s astonishing debut feature “Blue Jean” — which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week, no doubt primed to pick up a swath of gongs and laurels — could well be a relic exhumed from the back cupboards of a dusty film archive. 

READ MORE: Venice Film Festival Preview: 16 Must-See Films To Watch

Set amid Margaret Thatcher’s reign of terror in the late ‘80s, the little-known Rosy McEwen puts in a calling card performance for the ages as Jean, a closeted lesbian gym teacher torn asunder by the emergence of Section 28: barbaric British legislation that, until 2003, prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” across the country.

Continue reading ‘Blue Jean’ Review: Georgia Oakley’s Brilliant Debut Is An Astonishingly Credible, Complex Queer ’80s Drama [Venice] at The Playlist.

Darren Aronofsky loves reclaiming the broken, the damaged, the forgotten. Take his magnum opus, 2008’s “The Wrestler,” the story of an aging WWE entertainer who gives it all for one more shot at glory. While 2005’s “Sin City” had already brought star Mickey Rourke back into the Hollywood fold, here his return was concreted, completed, the talk of the town, and etched onto shining plaques.

Continue reading ‘The Whale’ Review: Brendan Fraser And Sadie Sink Are A Heartbreaking Duo In Darren Aronofsky’s Best Film Since ‘The Wrestler’ [Venice] at The Playlist.

The greatest strength of Ti West’s “X,” the very A24 vibes ‘n all sex-slasher which premiered to tepid acclaim at South By Southwest earlier this year, was never its reverence for “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” nor its lurid ‘70s grit and grain, nor its abundance of pornstaches. No, no: a double-dipping Mia Goth was the lynchpin, be it caked in prosthetics as the melting, murderous octogenarian Pearl or starlet-in-the-making (with an aptly porn-y name) Max Minx.

Continue reading ‘Pearl’ Review: Mia Goth Totally Kills It In Ti West’s ‘X’ Origin Story [Venice] at The Playlist.

To love is to want to consume someone whole, to pick their skin and sinews out of the gaps between your teeth, to swallow their pancreas and wash it all down with gulps of throat-fizzing stomach acid. Take the age-old question that dominates the Grindr lexicon: do you want to be someone, be with them, or be inside them? “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino’s typically sumptuous, deeply romantic American parable — about a pair of teen cannibals, coming of age against the backdrop of ‘80s Reaganism — literalizes this allure, as any great anthropophagist love story should.

Continue reading ‘Bones And All’ Review: Timothée Chalamet Shines In Luca Guadagnino’s Ravishing Cannibal Coming-Of-Ager [Venice] at The Playlist.

If you ever questioned it before, let “Bardo” — wordily subtitled ‘or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,’ as was the director’s wont with 2014’s “Birdman” — lay your queries to rest: Alejandro Iñárritu really, really loves Fellini. He’s not the only one, naturally: comparisons to “8 ½” are par for the course whenever a filmmaker comes out with a notionally autobiographical work, as with Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory” in 2019.

Continue reading ‘Bardo’ Review: Forget ‘Roma,’ Alejandro Iñárritu Wishes His ‘Handful of Truths,’ Was His’ 8 ½’ [Venice] at The Playlist.

Who is Lydia Tár? Is she the acclaimed composer-conductor celebrated by The New Yorker in the opening of the movie that shares her fictional namesake as generational? Is she the heavily pruned and curated brand that she herself cultivates, her swishy suit pants as well-measured as her staccato? Or, indeed, is there an all-the-more sinister side: a narcissistic megalomaniac as beholden to her plaudits as she is driven by them? 

READ MORE: Venice Film Festival Preview: 16 Must-See Films To Watch

The truth, as is so often the case, is nestled in the center of the Venn Diagram, astutely observes director Todd Field in his first film for sixteen years, “Tár.” Though not without its blemishes, here’s a timely — and, indeed, timeless — piece about the corrupting essence of power, exploitation, and the burdensome nature of the crown, elevated by a hydrogen bomb of a performance from Cate Blanchett, inarguably at her best since 2015’s “Carol.”

The aforementioned questions emerge, of course, across the two hours and change of runtime; as far as we’re concerned, the Lydia Tár we’re initially introduced to is a flawless demigod.

Continue reading ‘TÁR’ Review: Cate Blanchett Is At Her Best Since ‘Carol’ In This Music World Psychodrama [Venice] at The Playlist.

As a procedural drama centrally interested in the radicalization of a young Muslim boy in Belgium, Adil & Bilall’s “Rebel” pulsates with terrible inevitability. Falling behind at school, with an adored older brother already having made the trip to Syria and a trafficker whispering in his ear, it’s less a question of if Nassim (Amir El Arbi, another tremendous kid actor for Cannes ’22 to tick off) is going to find himself on the Jihadist frontline, but when.

Continue reading ‘Rebel’ Review: Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah’s Radicalization Drama Pulsates With Terrible Inevitability [Cannes] at The Playlist.

Though shot and set prior to the Russian invasion, by dint of being a Ukrainian picture detailing the aftermath of a woman soldier’s assault in the Donbas, “Butterfly Vision” lays claim to uniquely wretched timeliness at this year’s Cannes. What is an impressive if formally flawed first film from Maksym Nakonechnyi earns some emotional weight vis-a-vis present events: the Ukrainian flags of blue and white, flown with unsparing pride across Nakonechnyi’s images, bear the immediate frisson of beleaguered resistance, and that women Stateside presently face unprecedented threats to their bodily autonomy only compounds the miserable resonance.

Continue reading ‘Butterfly Vision’: Maksym Nakonechnyi’s Debut Is A Relevant, Resilient Ukrainian Drama [Cannes] at The Playlist.

The great majority of us could only aspire, before “Moonage Daydream,” to step into the mind of David Bowie — the persona, the artist, the entity not yet proven terrestrial. Eclectic, unashamedly maximalist, and variously philosophical: all true of both the man himself and Brett Morgen’s feature-length docu-odyssey, which borrows its title from the 1976 hit, and just debuted as part of Cannes’ Midnight slate. Fifty years of Bowie’s career are traversed here, from the moment he collided with the earth and found a fervorous, tears-in-their-eyes-and-hands-in-the-air fanbase, right through to his return to the cosmos in the early-2010s.

Continue reading ‘Moonage Daydream’ Review: Brett Morgen Beams You To Planet David Bowie In A Musical Space Extravaganza [Cannes] at The Playlist.

With the true-crime renaissance in full swing over on the small screen, it feels appropriate that a similar spike should be felt in the moviehouse. “The Stranger,” the sophomore feature from Aussie TV guy Thomas M. Wright that premiered yesterday in Un Certain Regard, is the latest film to try and scratch that particular itch — try, alas, being the watchword. Unraveling mystery, throat-snatching tension, tragedy and trauma in abundance; you’ll find little of that here, at least for the first hour, where the film veers between frail tangents and manifold branches that make the whole thing an annoying chore.

Continue reading ‘The Stranger’ Review: We’re Here For A True Crime, Not A Good Time [Cannes] at The Playlist.

“Bait,” British filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s breakout feature, could well be considered a horror movie. Set in a quaint little fishing enclave off the Cornish coast, where the ship decks are rickety and the townhouses’ whitewash ever-peeling, the knotty fear of loss is ever-present: of history, of possession, of tradition, of heritage, of liberty. It manifests formally in the deep chiaroscuro of Jenkin’s monochrome images, shot on 16mm film, richly textural, and ever cast in shadow; in the distorted sound mix, voices are heard as if captured through a shoddy synthesizer, like painful memories catching up to the present.

Continue reading ‘Enys Men’ Review: Mark Jenkin Crafts A Wicked, Witchy Folk Freak Horror That Defies Genre [Cannes] at The Playlist.

It’s 1943. A particularly cruel winter has swept through the occupied Soviet Union. Its rural territories are an endless landscape of frosty forests, pocked with horse-swallowing sinkholes. Making do amid the bitter freeze, two hunters float down a misty river on a makeshift raft. With them they carry their latest prize: a hefty buck, provisions for a month or so in current conditions, one would think, well rationed. Understandably skittish, they spot a soldier at the edge of the river.

Continue reading ‘Natural Light’ Beautifully Explores How A Man Can Be Corrupted By The Horrors Of War [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.

How often does the cosmos grant us love at first sight? What if you were to be given such an exceptional gift, derived from an impossible encounter in the middle of the street, only for it to be teasingly snatched away? You may think it far from likely, but this is precisely what happens to Giorgi (Giorgi Bochorishvili), and Lisa (Ani Karseladze) in “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?

Continue reading ‘What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?’: Alexandre Koberidze Creates A Compelling Fable From The Putty Of Love [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.

Once upon a time, you were guaranteed flawlessness from a Pixar production, aside from the odd “Cars” flick here and there. The studio has, however, become something of a sequel mill over the past decade, boasting only a few masterworks since the halcyon days of “Ratatouille,” “WALL-E” and “Up”; the five years since they released what was arguably their greatest work, “Inside Out,” stands out as something of a creative no man’s land.

Continue reading ‘Soul’ Vividly Recaptures Joy & Is A Mesmerizing Return To Form For Pixar [Review] at The Playlist.

June 1962: Novocherkassk, the USSR. The halcyon days of Stalin’s premiership, where meat rations were plentiful and cigarettes easy to come by, are over. The Soviet people face conditions of significant hardship: Socks are seldom free of holes, backroom trades are conducted for pantyhose and candy bars, and crowds build from dusk at the local deli, desperate for whatever rations they can grab. The prices of meat and milk are on the rise and rates for workers are falling – conditions one might consider ripe for revolution.

Continue reading ‘Dear Comrades’ Is A Beautifully Crafted Look At A Bloody Soviet Tragedy [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

What do you get if you combine the bleak social discourse of “Black Mirror,” the wittingly jarring voice of Peter Strickland, and the dreamlike sensibility of Leos Carax–before adding an unwelcome squeeze of out-of-date social commentary? Jason Segel’s “Dispatches From Elsewhere,” apparently: An anthology series which yields a fascinating metatextual spine and great performances, yet comes up short in its murky musings on contemporary trans politics.

Continue reading ‘Dispatches From Elsewhere’: Jason Segel’s Mixes ‘Black Mirror,’ Leos Carax & Iffy Social Commentary [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.

To utilize a neurological disorder at the center of your film’s narrative carries a massive weight of responsibility. Cinema has historically utilized mental illness in a ham-fisted manner—as nothing more than a trope to propel melodrama. The nuances are lost. A delicate touch must be used, and if not gentle, you must at least be aware of how close one can veer towards exploitation. Unfortunately, “The Roads Not Taken,” Sally Potter’s facile study of Leo (Javier Bardem), a man wrought by an unidentified mental illness, ventures far more into the realm of exploitation.

Continue reading ‘The Roads Not Taken’: Sally Potter Disappoints With A Melodramatic Take On Mental Illness [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.

There are few shots in the pantheon of cinema as iconic as that of the Monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It’s a haunting image that, combined with its shrill score—a whirlwind of strings and wails, tearing away at your very soul—breaks you into vulnerability. In the Monolith lies the universe: To look at it is to witness both the swathing cosmos and the birth of humankind. It serves as the manifest muse for “Last And First Men,” a meditative and altogether awe-inspiring visual poem directed and scored by the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Continue reading ‘Last And First Men’: Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Directorial Debut Is An Awe-Inspiring Experience [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.

Abel Ferrara attempts to understand the complexities of man with “Siberia,” a study of interweaving dualities—some complex and challenging, some less so—such as day and night, the tundra and the desert, and, at an astonishingly superficial level, the difference between right and wrong. His philosophical conversations maunder, varying wildly in complexity—yet some moments of “Siberia” capture authentic tragedy, grief, and pathos. Despite these moments, which are genuinely moving, Ferrara’s film is far too disjointed and philosophically wavering to reach the level of quality it sets out to achieve. 

READ MORE: 12 Most Anticipated Films Of The 2020 Berlin International Film Festival

Clint (Willem Dafoe) is a man who lives in a state of self-isolation, both geographically and psychologically.

Continue reading ‘Siberia’: Willem Dafoe Is A Highlight In Abel Ferrara’s Cold, Disjointed Film [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.

Anticipation for “Undine” has been palpable on the lead-in to the 70th Berlinale, being Christian Petzold’s sixth feature to be seen at the festival—particularly off the back of last year’s acclaimed “Transit,” which competed for the Golden Bear. And it appears this anticipation has broadly been justified. While “Undine” is initially rather languid, it soon becomes a fascinating and very gorgeously realized thing to behold. 

Continue reading ‘Undine’: Christian Petzold Returns With A Beautiful, Fantastical Romance [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.

All creatives, at one point or another, have been confronted with a particularly frustrating nuisance: The need to survive. The unique frustration spurred from this is predominantly born, of course, out of the fact that the creative passions—poetry, storytelling, filmmaking—seem almost impossible to monetize until one makes it to the glittering heights stardom and success. The old cliché of “write what you know” clearly rings true to filmmakers, given the abundance of films that rely on this particular brand of metanarrative.

Continue reading ‘My Salinger Year’: Margaret Qualley & Sigourney Weaver Delight In This Twee, Feel-Good Drama [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.

If you’ve seen his Oscar-winning “The Great Beauty” or last year’s “Loro,” you’ll already be aware of Paolo Sorrentino’s directorial MO: he’s a stylistic auteur who readily embraces the ornate, the flamboyant, and the glamorous. Unlike others of his ilk, though – your Nicholas Winding Refns, your Gaspar Noés, your Tom Fords – it’ll be a rare day when Sorrentino’s aesthetic sensibility comes at the expense of his storytelling aptitude.

Continue reading ‘The New Pope’: The Second Coming Of The Acclaimed Paolo Sorrentino Series Is Dazzling [Venice Review] at The Playlist.