Jennifer Lawrence already had a billion-dollar franchise, an Academy Award, and worldwide acclaim to her name before turning 30. Now fully transitioned into adult roles, Lynne Ramsey’s singular and challenging Die My Love might be the defining performance of Lawrence’s career.
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Jennifer Lawrence is a force of nature in #DieMyLove, a tumultuous tale of postpartum depression. The portrayal is effective, albeit frustrating (rightfully so). But I wish there was more of a script & a story to hold it all together. Particularly as things start to fall apart.
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This story’s eventual happy ending is shown in the first couple of minutes when we see contemporary footage of someone kicking the Italian dictator’s corpse in the head. It is a useful reminder that only change is constant. This new Italian series is currently available on Now TV, that’s the subscription service that you can […]
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Directed by Ninja Thyberg, Pleasure casts a critical eye on the porn industry, which has a cycle of abuse that particularly affects women. Rooted in realism it watches very much like a fictionalized version of a documentary.
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A serious yet poignant documentary that explores the parallels between the historical portrayal of witches & mental illness during & after pregnancy.
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My sister, years back, discovered some old movies of us on holiday. I distinctly remember me and my dad, walking over a wooden bridge and me bouncing up and down on it “Look how pissed off you made him!” laughed my sister, as there in the fuzzy world of the past, my dad looked back […]
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Told from multiple perspectives, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster is a multi-faceted drama about a lack of understanding in our world.
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A Mexican cartel leader undergoes gender-affirming surgery in Jacques Audiard’s really bad musical Emilia Pérez.
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Sid Vicious came out of the British working-class. He was rude, uneducated, violent, and profane. Unlike Keith Moon, who was one of the greatest drummers who ever lived, he wasn’t even a particularly good musician. Nancy Spungen came out of the American middle-class. She was an abrasive, emotionally needy substance abuser who wasn’t even particularly […]
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Nagisa Oshima’s controversial erotic art film, “In the Realm of the Senses,” as it is known in the United States, has two other titles. L’Empire des Sens (Empire of Senses) in France, and an original Japanese title, Ai no Corrida (Bullfight of Love). For once, I believe that the Americans got it right with their […]
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A coming-of-age drama set in Kent, England, Bird tells the story of a rebellious twelve-year-old girl with an eye for the innocent beauty around her. Though unfamiliar with the works of writer/director Andrea Arnold, I was surprised to find a quiet calmness in her depiction of the female preteen experience. She manages to capture an […]
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I feel as if In the Mood for Love is just about impossible to write about. A lot of films benefit from a lot of analysis, making what you see on screen that much more clear and powerful, or perhaps even that much more expansive and mysterious in its ideas. I watched In the Mood […]
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“But what that Comanche believes, ain’t got no eyes, he can’t enter the spirit-land. Has to wander forever between the winds.” -Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in The Searchers Paris, Texas is a difficult film, and though I have come to love it by thinking it over the past couple days, I do not think it’s […]
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Muhteşem kadro seçimiyle ‘burn after reading’ filmi; alkolik olduğu öne sürülerek CIA’deki işinden kovulan emekli ajan Ozzie Cox’ın, intikam almak için gizli bilgileri bir cd’ye kaydetmesiyle başlıyor. Cox ile boşanmak isteyen eşi Katie ise cd’yi gizlice alır ve gittiği spor salonunda unutur. Spor salonunun (ve benim gözümde filmin süper ikilisi) iki çalışanı Chad ve Linda […]
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It’s impossible to talk about “Lamb,” the Icelandic creature thriller, without revealing its central theme. Co-written by first-time-writer/director Valdimar Jóhannsson, who used to work as a special effects crew for Hollywood blockbusters like “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and “Prometheus,” and Icelandic poet Sjón, “Lamb” might be the oddest film you will ever see […]
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The buzz has been off the charts for “The Substance” following its May world premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival where it won the award for Best Screenplay. Since then it has only gained momentum, recently showing at the Toronto Independent Film Festival where it took home one of the People’s Choice awards. Now […]
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Adapting a chronicle of Amsterdam Holocaust victims’ stories, McQueen does a one-note meditation on past and present.
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Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents is not a heist film, but it does begin with an elaborate bank robbery. It is not exactly a thriller, either, though it borrows from plenty of the tropes you’d find in an exciting thriller film with a heist as its centerpiece. Elaborate planning, blackmail, prison politics, uneasy partnerships, paranoia of…
The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry is set between Berlin and a small port town overlooking the Red Sea, with a rather complicated history
One feels that thinking on a film by the Coen brothers, especially a comedy, is a fruitless exercise. Those guys design their work in such a way that it’s not merely immune to navel-gazing, it actually mocks the navel-gazers. And bless their hearts for it. As David Bazan has sung: You’re so creative With your…
