Man, the 20th century really thought it was something, didn’t it? Thankfully, in the middle of the 1980s, just when Western (read: American) culture was fully losing the run of itself in a frenzy of gum-snapping consumerism and prescription narcotics, Don DeLillo‘s “White Noise” appeared — you might almost say manifested — as a mischievous, mindbending 326-page reminder to the century that it wasn’t, in fact, all that.

Continue reading ‘White Noise’ Review: Noah Baumbach Crafts A Callow But Enjoyable Tribute To Pre-Millennial Neurosis [Venice] at The Playlist.

Of all the unsolved mysteries in Claire Denis‘ new Berlin Competition film, the biggest may just be its U.S. retitling to a generic and not particularly representative “Fire.” The film’s English title in the rest of the world, “Both Sides of the Blade” — a line from the terrific Tindersticks track that ends the film —is not just cooler and more compelling.

Continue reading ‘Fire’: Juliette Binoche & Vincent Lindon Create Sparks But Only Tindersticks Truly Sets Claire Denis’ Love Triangle Alight [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.

It’s a strangely topsy-turvy experience, to come to a director’s first film 14 years, six further features, an Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize (“Father of my Children“), and a Berlin Silver Bear for Best Director (“Things To Come“) after she made it. And perhaps it’s an inevitably compromised – or at least altered – experience too: “All is Forgiven” can’t help but be viewed now through the prism of Mia Hansen-Løve‘s subsequent career, a retrospective perspective made even more unavoidable by the retrospection of her most recent feature “Bergman Island,” which is playing in theaters at the same time that Metrograph is giving her debut a long-overdue US release. 

Continue reading ‘All Is Forgiven’ Review: Mia Hansen-Løve’s Delicate Debut Is More Than Just A Taste Of Things To Come at The Playlist.

In shades of the gunmetal gray that has become the grading palette of choice for Serious Historical Epics — possible because arterial blood spray shows up so nice and red against it —Ridley Scott‘s starry, surprisingly engaging “Rashomon“-inflected “The Last Duel” opens on the wintry December day of the duel in question. Battle-scarred knight Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), granite-faced despite an obscene mullet haircut that can only have been the result of a lost bet, is being helped into his armor.

Continue reading Ridley Scott’s ‘The Last Duel’: An Enjoyably Ripe Slab Of Historical Hokum That Proves Men Have Been Awful For At Least 7 Centuries [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Of all the evenings for the Haddonfield Department of Plausible Human Behavior to close early, it’s deeply unfortunate that October 31, 2018 had to be one of them. For ’twas on that very night that the events soberly documented in “Halloween” (2018), David Gordon Green‘s fun first stab (intentional, as are all puns that follow) at revitalizing John Carpenter‘s beloved franchise, took place. And it is on the same night, a little bit during but mostly just immediately after all those creative impalings, knifings, shootings, beatings, and trappings-in-the-cellar-and-burnings, that “Halloween Kills” unfolds — though don’t worry overmuch if you can’t remember precisely the ins and outs of who got offed when and where in the previous film, as Green provides plenty of flashbacks and callbacks to remind you. 

Continue reading ‘Halloween Kills’ …And Kills And Kills, But Sadly Does Not Slay [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Like finding a grubby, balled-up bill in your spangly g-string and uncrumpling it to discover doughy old Ben Franklin staring benignly back at you, Ana Lily Amirpour‘s third feature is a sweet, scuzzy surprise made all the sweeter/scuzzier because you don’t know quite what you did to deserve it. Certainly, at the Venice Film Festival –where “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” snuck into competition – giggling into one’s mask at its garish but gladhearted genre excesses felt like getting away with something naughty.

Continue reading Ana Lily Amirpour’s ‘Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon’ is a Sweet, Scuzzy Blast of Pure Escapism [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Guess it had to happen sometime, but it’s a shame that the previously-thought-to-be inexhaustible energy resource of Edgar Wright’s omnivorous, giddy cinephilia should finally be showing signs running out right now, just when a jaded, weary, pandemic-drab world could use it most. Don’t get me wrong: with its dual-timeline gimmick and its evident love for the pastichey recreation of London in the Swinging Sixties decorating a coming-of-ager that becomes a fish-out-of-water drama that morphs into a murder-mystery that then turns into a slasher-horror, “Last Night in Soho,” which premiered today at the Venice Film Festival, boasts as ambitious a genre-melding concept as Wright has ever fielded.

Continue reading ‘Last Night In Soho’ Sees Edgar Wright Running On The Fumes Of Old Enthusiasms [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

If you have even the smallest dislike of the grotesquely redundant and regressive institution that is the British monarchy, one of the greatest pleasures of the shamelessly pleasurable, archly self-aware, high camp masterpiece that is Pablo Larraín‘s “Spencer,” is envisioning how it will play to the still-living people it glancingly portrays. Imagine the creasing of Royal brows sending Royal spectacles cascading down Royal noses! Picture the Royal flushes creeping up Royal necks!

Continue reading Kristen Stewart Is An Incandescent Diana In Pablo Larraín’s Tremendous ‘Spencer’ [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Some opening films merely open their festivals; Pedro Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers” bursts the Venice Film Festival wide like a piñata that’s been crammed with storylines as contrived as its feelings are genuine, so that melodrama rains down in ribbons from the screen, and conflicting emotions scatter like so much color-blocked confetti. And for this, a thousand times, bless him: in a world turned careful and considered (not by choice but by necessity) this extravagant, exuberant, magnificently messy movie, punch-drunk on story and delirious with drama, is the antidote to a cinematic lethargy you may not even have known you were feeling, until one of its legitimately insane plot pirouettes forcibly reminds you just how much dimension and chaos and vitality a flat beam of light projected onto a wall can contain.

Continue reading ‘Parallel Mothers’: Pedro Almodóvar’s Latest Is Bold, Messy, Ridiculous & Brilliant [Venice Review] at The Playlist.

Lockdown affected us all in peculiar ways, and given that veteran provocateur Abel Ferrara was pretty damn peculiar to begin with, it’s no surprise that “Zeros And Ones” — a fiction that makes use of the non-fictional pandemic in ways both fascinating and frustrating — should turn out to be such a conundrum, equal parts confounding and intriguing, repellent and rewarding. Ostensibly a more genre-based exercise than Ferrara’s last few films – there are explosions, soldiers, guns, spycams, and foot chases through the livid Rome night — in fact, this new dystopian drama may be more difficult and inaccessible than his 2020 Berlin mindfuck “Siberia,” which at least had a fish quoting Nietzsche to signal that perhaps it wasn’t all meant entirely seriously. 

READ MORE: Abel Ferrara Talks ‘Siberia,’ Working With Dennis Hopper, Staying Sober & Much More [Deep Focus Podcast]

“Zeros and Ones,” by contrast, is profoundly serious — possibly to the detriment of understanding its sludgier undercurrents; a little bit of leavening humor might have made it all less impenetrable.

Continue reading Abel Ferrara’s ‘Zeros And Ones’ With Ethan Hawke Is A Flashbulb Pop Of Pandemic-Era Filmmaking & A Fascinating, Ferocious Funsuck [Locarno Review] at The Playlist.

John Swab‘s fourth feature film as writer-director-producer, “Ida Red,” (and if it’s your first of his, don’t feel too bad; it well may also be your last) starts with a police stop that turns out to be a heist. On a deserted stretch of highway late at night, a nicely spoken cop, played by Josh Hartnett, asks politely to see a trucker’s manifest. And when the tired, irascible trucker seeks permission to retrieve it from his door compartment, you feel a frisson of worry.

Continue reading ‘Ida Red’ With Josh Hartnett, Frank Grillo And Melissa Leo Asks: What if ‘Animal Kingdom’ But Dumb And Oklahoman? [Locarno Review] at The Playlist.

Look, sometimes even the snootiest of cinephiles, with the most obscurantist of cinematic palates (generally well served by the Locarno Film Festival selection), just needs a movie about a massive sinkhole. And when that mood strikes, now there’s Kim Ji-hoon‘s “Sinkhole,” aka “Sing-keu-hol” (pronounced: “Sinkhole”), a modest little social issues drama about a boy from a rural farming community who haha just kidding it’s about a sinkhole.

Continue reading ‘Sinkhole’ Is A Silly, Sentimental, Satisfying Comedic Disaster Movie About Man’s Inhumanit–No, It’s About A Really Big Sinkhole [Locarno Review] at The Playlist.

For a film in which John David Washington lurches, staggers, stumbles, shambles, flounders, falters, wobbles, scrabbles and totters across an entire Greek province, getting shot, stabbed, cuffed (often in the very same already broken arm), punched, beaten, chased and stung by bees, is in two-car crashes but also gets hit by a car, escapes in the trunk of a car, gets in a taser fight in a car and eventually falls from a great height onto a car,  “Beckett” sure is dull.

Continue reading Netflix’s ‘Beckett’ With John David Washington, Alicia Vikander & Vicky Krieps: A Wrong-Man Thriller That Never Gets It Right [Locarno Review] at The Playlist.

Replete with peculiar ideas about the nightmare of modern conflict, especially in bleakly undefined, but vaguely former-Soviet territories, Armenian director Marat Sargsyan’s debut, which started its life in Venice Critics’ Week and just picked up a Special Mention in the Transilvania International Film Festival Competition, is a strange and not wholly successful mixture of confounding and compelling. But thanks to some truly original, very striking imagery and the vague sense that Sargsyan knows what he’s getting at, even if you don’t, if you’re willing to commit resources to the tense ground war between frustration and revelation, the latter just about wins out. 

READ MORE: Best Of Cannes 2021: 15 Must-See Movies From The Festival

For one thing, the film’s genuinely magnificent opening tides you through the early longueurs: through an eerily unreal icy landscape, with the ridges of far-off mountain ranges sticking up like dinosaur bones, the camera picks its way through craggy glacial formations.

Continue reading ‘The Flood Won’t Come’ Is A Challengingly Distorted Image Of The Pitiless Purgatory Of War [Transilvania Review] at The Playlist.

Brush past the terrible English title (also sometimes written as “That Was Life” which is marginally more comprehensible but still needlessly generic) and David Martín de los Santos‘ debut feature, titled in Spanish “La Vida Era Eso,” awaits to unfurl its superbly performed, constantly surprising, deeply moving series of everyday miracles on you. Starting off as an odd-couple drama, morphing into a later-life journey of self-discovery while taking a couple of detours into offbeat platonic romance territory, this Transilvania International Film Festival competition film is really a salutary valentine to sudden, unlikely friendships springing forth between strangers, creating unexpected oases of hope and discovery within the desert of everyday routine.

Continue reading ‘That Was Life’ Is A Continually Surprising Delight About Later-Life Awakening [Transilvania Review] at The Playlist.

It’s a good thing you can’t catch a virus from an image because if you could, just a few frames of Kirill Serebrennikov‘s fabulously yeasty, bilious, dank Competition title, “Petrov’s Flu” would bring all of Cannes‘ anti-Covid measures to naught. A feverish delirium of a film that rollicks through an apocalyptically bleak Yekaterinburg New Years’ Eve as though strapped to an out-of-control hospital gurney, its long takes go on for little eternities, as Serebrennikov weaves queasily into diseased reality and out of splintered memory, colliding bravura filmmaking with theatrical staging and an almost old-fashioned literary vibe.

Continue reading ‘Petrov’s Flu’: Kirill Serebrennikov’s Contagious, Crazed Drama Is Unhingedly Creative [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having. “Titane,” Ducournau’s follow-up to her sensational debut “Raw,” is roughly seven horror movies plus one bizarrely tender parent-child romance soldered into one machine and painted all over with flames: it’s so replete with startling ideas, suggestive ellipses, transgressive reversals and preposterous propositions that it ought to be a godforsaken mess.

Continue reading ‘Titane’: The New Flesh Is Thriving, Living Rent-Free in Julia Ducournau’s F*cked Up Metallica Brain [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

July 12th, 2021, Cannes – Reader, I ratatat out this missive in haste on my trusty Smith-Corona from the South of France, in the paltry hopes it may adequately convey my delight in viewing the latest cinematographic marvel from Mr. Wes Anderson, originally of Houston, Texas but more latterly resident of a nearby color-coded, symmetrical nebula almost entirely of his own design. “The French Dispatch,” Mr.

Continue reading ‘The French Dispatch’: Wes Anderson Dazzles With A Whimsical New Missive Of Wit & Short Story Delights [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

There’s a lovely wind that blows across the island of Fårö, Ingmar Bergman‘s actual home for several years, and his spiritual home for several decades. Even in the summer, when Mia Hansen-Løve‘s “Bergman Island” is set, the breeze is constant, cool and a little salt-dampened, tousling Vicky Krieps’ hair, scudding through the tufts of scraggly dune-grass and sweeping majestically across the vast empty spaces where the point of this movie is supposed to be.

Continue reading ‘Bergman Island’: Mia Hansen-Løve’s Breezy Relationship Auto-Fiction Is A Wisp Of A Film [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

One should perhaps not read too much into the fact that the press screening of Kornel Mundruczó‘s “Evolution” was timed to coincide with the final of the UEFA European Football Championship. But if playing it to an inevitably thinned-out crowd is hardly a mark of confidence, the lack of faith is sadly well-placed: Mundruczó’s return to Cannes is just as messy as his 2017 Competition entry, “Jupiter’s Moon,” confused and glib and at times in even more dubious taste than that story of a refugee gifted with inexplicable, messianic superpowers. 

READ MORE: Cannes Film Festival 2021 Preview: 25 Films To Watch

A tripartite tale that the press notes assure me is about how the legacy of the past echoes onto future generations, “Evolution” is all the more dispiriting for those of us who fell for “Pieces of a Woman,” Mundruczó’s last film (and last collaboration with partner Kata Weber, also the screenwriter here) – still a remarkable work with a scorcher of a central performance from Vanessa Kirby.

Continue reading ‘Evolution’: Kornel Mundruczó’s Drama Is A Misguided Three-Parter About The Legacy of the Holocaust [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

For just a moment, as a particularly sepulchral stretch of Anne Dudley‘s liturgical score plays over a solemn black screen emblazoned with the words “inspired by real events,” you might think Paul Verhoeven‘s gone and gotten serious on us, and that “Benedetta,” his hotly lusted-after Cannes title is going to be, whisper it, tasteful. About 73 seconds later, little Benedetta, the pious, doted-upon daughter of a wealthy lord who’s on her way to become a nun, performs her first “miracle” and gets a bird to shit magnificently into a guy’s eye — phew.

Continue reading Bless Us ‘Benedetta,’ For Paul Verhoeven Has Sinned [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

Well, that was weird. 

Oscar night felt a bit like an off-brand version of an Oscar night – and not in a bad way (at least until the end). But there were times when the rehearsal-dinner vibe was impossible to ignore, especially at the end when it felt like ringmaster Steven Soderbergh handed the reins to Luis Buñuel, everyone was getting a little tetchy and impatient, the cake course was served before the entree and when it was time for Gramps’ speech he’d already gone to bed – possibly embarrassed by Mamaw’s twerking.

Continue reading The Snubs And Surprises Of The 2021 Oscars at The Playlist.

A sun-flared and bong-addled tumble into a teenage Texan summer rife with bombshells and boyfriend problems, “Cusp,” from debut directors Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt is one of those fractal-style documentaries, in which any given sliver contains all the colors and contours of the whole. The opening is a case in point: Long-haired girls lounge on a swing in the park, scoffing, wriggling, idly shooting the shit – it could be any year from any of the last five or six decades, except for the phones they glance at every now and then.

Continue reading ‘Cusp’: A Beautiful And Bruised Teenage Summer Fling [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

So Nic Cage is a bank robber sprung, naked except for a sumo-nappy, from a lengthy stint in jail by the white-hatted, black-hearted Governor (Bill Moseley) of a fake Japanese cowboy town populated exclusively by caged Geisha prostitutes, one of the favorites of whom, Bernice (Sofia Boutella, being bafflingly good again despite the material) recently escaped, so The Governor straps Cage into a leather suit rigged with explosives on the arms, neck and testicles that are primed to explode if they detect his intention to physically harm – or get turned on by – “a helpless woman,” and sends him off into a neighboring irradiated wasteland where Time doesn’t work properly and which is populated by Mad Max-style bandits, itinerant preachers, downtrodden desperadoes, filthy-faced ragamuffin children and people who have been rendered mute and partially encased in fragments of mannequin bodies, with three days to locate Bernice and five to bring her back before his suit, to which the Governor carries the key on a chain around his neck, explodes and kills him, (I know you’re absolutely longing for a period by now; imagine how it feels to watch this thing), a deal to which Cage tacitly agrees – what choice has he?

Continue reading ‘Prisoners Of The Ghostland’: No Brains, But Big TesticaaAARRRGHLs [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

Take the nomad out of “Nomadland,” and you’re left with “Land,” Robin Wright‘s feature-directing debut (she previously directed 10 episodes of “House of Cards“), in which she also stars, as a grieving woman who, somewhat ironically given the film bows in the era of mandatory isolation, moves way up into the mountains “to get away from people.” Problem is, take the nomadic element out of “Nomadland” (she moves only once and has done with it) and you’re also left with a less interesting, much more obvious movie, in which not only are we not introduced to a radically different way of living, we’re ultimately confirmed in our safest and most simplistic assumptions about how we live right now.

Continue reading ‘Land’: Robin Wright Directs Herself Through A Familiar Wilderness Grieving Process [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.