An astonishingly brave and assured debut feature that is as difficult to watch as anything from, say, the New French Extremity movement. The explicitness, intimacy, and brutality are especially challenging on a first viewing, and that first viewing is further complicated by fragmentation and nonlinear narrative. This is not a bad thing. Violation is almost a textbook exploration of the ripples, fragments, and warps of violent experience, and it uses those warps, fragments, and ripples to get us thnking about…
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Silent Night 2023
The story's utterly generic, politically reactionary, and so sentimental it turns to kitsch at times ... but Woo has fun. The constraint of trying to make a movie without dialogue is pretty silly at times and definitely unnecessary, but there's something to be admired in how committed Woo is to it. Overall: some nice shots, some good editing, some good action scenes.
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Hereditary 2018
Utter drivel. Worse: Shallow, self-important drivel. It does nothing that a hundred other horror movies haven't done, but it does so with a greater sense of its own artfulness. There's about 15 minutes of actual movie stretched out through endlessly long shots and camera movements, then all of it tossed away in one of the most ridiculous endings of all time. A monumentally bad film.
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The Queen's Gambit 2020
Ahh, the good old tortured genius narrative! Every story about an exceptional person either has to show them destroyed by their genius or triumphing after suffering (often via drugs and alcohol).
While well performed and expensively decorated, The Queen's Gambit is nothing but a big bag of clichés, utterly conventional and predictable except for its length, which is ... long. One of the virtues of the Walter Tevis novel it's based on is its fleetness. The mini-series substitutes fleet for…