One of the great pleasures of experiencing Mia Hansen-Løve's filmography is coming to the gradual realization that her chosen protagonists all have such endlessly fascinating professions. Even more intriguing, however is how those noteworthy jobs wind up tying somewhat directly into the personal hurdles with which those characters wind up confronted—a small-time film producer struggling to keep all the pieces of his life together; an aspiring architect looking to build a foundation for her own love life; an interpreter unable…
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 2023
$295 million can buy you quite a few things, from an above average facelift to a below average single-bedroom apartment in Toronto. If you were a Disney executive at any point in the last six or seven years, you might have thought it a wise investment to dump the entire GDP of Andorra as the principal payment on that pension plan Harrison Ford will never actually use. Such is the case with the impending tax write-off Indiana Jones and the…
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El Conde 2023
Full disclosure: I am not, as many of you are no doubt aware by now, Chilean. I am also, regrettably, not all that well-versed in Chilean history, particularly with regards to the infamous reign of Augusto Pinochet. Normally, such a preface would seem superfluous for a review, but given the apparent correlation between lukewarm reception to Pablo Larraín's El Conde and a lack of deep knowledge on the film's subject matter, it only seems fitting to add a contribution to…
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Take Out 2004
Though Sean Baker is primarily known for his later output (and rightfully so), it makes perfect sense that the career of America's underclass hero would begin at the boom of the digital age of cinema. A director primarily known for his human-level approach to uncovering overlooked pockets of US life, it's only fitting that his voice would begin to take shape in the wake of the Dogme 95 movement; only a few years after horror cinema would embrace the found…
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Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom 2019
Let this be a lesson to all you self-proclaimed Oscar pundits out there: no matter how airtight the perceived top 5 list for International Feature may be, always expect whichever committee votes on these nominees to throw in at least one curveball to fuck with everybody! This year, I learned that lesson the hard way when perhaps the easiest slam dunk category of the year was upended with the untimely demise of Asghar Farhadi's best movie in almost a decade.…
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Wendell & Wild 2022
Every so often, you come across a film with such memorable side characters that your first instinct upon the roll of the credits is "Damn, they really should've made a movie about them, instead!" Henry Selick's long-awaited return to stop-motion, Wendell & Wild, is one such film, and the memorable side characters deserving of their own film are none other than... Wendell and Wild. The choice for Selick and co-writer Jordan Peele (who also voices Wild) to name the film after…
