By the time Alex Ross Perry arrived at Golden Exits, his novelistic style of cinema seemed to have reached an impasse. So staid and stylised that it bordered on self-parody, Golden Exits felt like a dead end, demanding a radical reconfiguration of Perry’s aesthetic and worldview. Perry provides something of that gesture in Her Smell, a fictional musical biopic starring Elisabeth Moss as Becky Something, the lead singer of Something She, a girl band that rose to prominence in the…

Over the last decade, Jillian Bell has been gradually consolidating for a breakout role and film. Not only has she performed a series of increasingly memorable side parts since first appearing in Bridesmaids, but she has enjoyed top billing in Workaholics and Idiotsitter, which she also wrote and created. During these ten years, Amy Schumer, Melissa McCarthy and Rebel Wilson all hit the stratosphere, and all challenged – in their different ways – the idea of how women were supposed…

The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the bestselling memoir by Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), which describes how he became one of the richest people in America through sustained security fraud. One of Belfort’s most prominent strategies was to sell worthless stocks to inexperienced customers – in effect, to sell nothing to nobodies – meaning that it was a career that subsisted less on providing goods than in raising the process of circulation itself to a fever pitch. As…

A kind of spiritual sequel to End of Watch, Dan Gilroy’s debut feature stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Louis Bloom, a petty criminal who turns his hand to freelance accident and crime scene photography to satisfy his yearnings to become a member of the professional class. Despite being set in Los Angeles, it’s clearly modelled on Michael Mann’s Thief – there’s the same procedural coldness, the same aversion to natural light, the same gravitation towards lurid, tungsten hues and, above all,…