No longer the Cynic.
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Beyond the Hills 2012
Following his landmark Palme d'Or win for 2007's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and preceding his shared Best Director win for Graduation, Cristian Mungiu found just as much success at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012 with Beyond the Hills, not only scooping up the Best Screenplay award for himself, but also netting his pair of leading performers the prize for Best Actress. With a style as unapologetically direct and unapproachable as Mungiu's, it's a wonder that the…
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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness 2022
Multiverse films are (thankfully) not as widespread as the same MCU that has invested quite a bit of stock into them lately, but in the past 6 months, the number of good multiverse films has impressively doubled. That figure seems less impressive when that doubled figure amounts to a whopping two films, but in the first half of 2022, Everything Everywhere All at Once ecstatically joined the lonely ranks of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Of course, the Spider-Man film that…
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Every Man for Himself 1980
Jean-Luc Godard's vigour as a filmmaker is evident in the fact that an enthusiastic cinephile could very easily dub themselves an "Intermediate-to-Advanced Godard Scholar" without ever setting foot outside his 1960s output. The man by no means slowed things down once the New Year's ball dropped to welcome 1970, but it's safe to say that, as far as the French New Wave pioneer's legacy is concerned, the bulk of Godard's renown is reserved towards those measly 19 films, plus his…
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Ulysses' Gaze 1995
History has always been a particular point of fascination for Theo Angelopoulos. It only seems right, then, that among his many efforts to loosely recreate different periods of Greek history throughout his career, he would eventually make a film that finds its protagonist acting as an Angelopoulos surrogate, doing the active reflection themselves. With Ulysses' Gaze, the director takes that opportunity for surrogacy very seriously, casting Harvey Keitel as a Greek film director named A(...ngelopoulos?). It's an interesting concept that…
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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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Crimes of the Future 2022
If it's true that David Cronenberg has been mulling over the details of Crimes of the Future for the better part of two decades, then the final film is proof that the Professor of Body Horror never made it past his first page of notes. After nearly 10 years out of the spotlight, Cronenberg's return to the big time feels pretty much exactly like what I, an avid Cronenberg agnostic, have grown to expect from my fellow Canuck on one…
