If Truffaut had to be taken from us so early (in 1984, aged just 52), then this might just be the most apt swan song this side of Eyes Wide Shut; a tribute to the American genre films he grew up adoring and spent his career remixing (films noir, screwball comedies, detective mysteries) and an equally adoring star vehicle for his eventual widow, Fanny Ardant.
Shot in beautiful black-and-white around Paris (again, ending as he began), it pokes gentle fun at genre…
The best new movie I've seen in over two years. Time bears out such claims, but my waters are telling me this is a genuine masterpiece. Bong's been making excellent films for nigh on two decades, but he's on a whole new level with this, a crystallisation of his entire career to date. A dazzlingly designed, tonally audacious and devastating dissection of late-capitalism class tension, wrapped up in an irresistibly entertaining multi-genre package, fronted by the peerless Song Kang-Ho, but, hell, everyone is pitch perfect here. Wow.
Initially interesting but increasingly meandering doc-xperiment feels ickier and less ethical as it wears on. What's more, its attack on assumed audience bloodlust is aimed in a way as to fundamentally misunderstand art's role in helping us make some semblance of sense of the senseless.
