The most opaque and least immediate film from the greatest director of animation that has ever lived. Takes all of the expected Studio Ghibli ingredients and paints them into a looping spiral of oppositions -- life/death, creation/destruction, art/reality, youth/old age -- a set of ever-expanding rhymes that (in)coheres the whole picture into a kind of dream poem, one that may either rumble your chest from deep within or alienate you from its infinitude of ideas. Luckily, I include myself in…
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Bottoms 2023
One would expect a lot more cleverness, edginess and punkish attitude from something that sells itself as a "high-school Fight Club for the girlies". Instead, what you get is a gender-flipped typical high-school comedy with it's typical formula cooked with its typical set of ingredients, undercooked to the point of tasting like basically nothing. It totally squanders its main premisse, the characters are never more than mere archetypes (except for Havana Rose Liu's, she's the best part of this by…
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Shin Kamen Rider 2023
"I've punched people to death. This power is monstruous."
I did like it, but I can't by the life of me figure out just how much. It probably takes a master like Anno to make such an eclectic mishmash of ideas and tones work on some emotional -- but definitely not logical -- level. Any other director would've fumbled this up big time. Amazing fight scenes and great melodrama throughout, but it feels flimsily strung together. Bug or feature, who…
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The Holdovers 2023
"Life is like a hen house ladder. Shitty and short."
Easily one of the year's best! It gave me the type of holiday spirit I didn't know I needed. Weaponizes its aesthetic nostalgia for a very deft and emotional purpose, and boy does the main trio here sell it! One already expects Giamatti to be great anywhere (and he is really great here), but boy did Dominic Sessa blow me away. One of the most dynamic performances I've seen in quite a long time. The dude deserves to be sprinkled all over the cinematic batch of the near future.
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Annette 2021
I really can't recall the last time I saw a film this actively antagonizing, where every itty bitty decision feels put together with a combination of an ironic smirk and a protruding middle finger, both pointed straight at the audience. Even all the way through to the marketing and the trailers, Annette is possibly the biggest rug pull of Carax's career -- and that is saying something. Apart from the opening scene, this really isn't the quirky Sparks musical I…
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Titane 2021
Cinema through the meat-grinder. Where Crash saw the arrival of avenues conflating the human and the mechanical, Titane rides them out to their logical brick wall, all in a hail of mighty thunder. It's all pure commitment to the desecration of the body, to ripping it from the clutches of theory and abstraction into the realm of sheer physicality. Here, gender and purpose cease to exist, it's all just meat and bones anyway -- crash it, break it, cut it,…
