Unbothered, unashamed, true to itself from the opening titles to the end credits' all-too-satisfying "Wake Up" needle drop: The Matrix Resurrections immediately feels like the most conceptually daring blockbuster of the past decade. It has absolutely no qualms in being this katana-sharp metatext that gleefully hacks away at the depressingly self-serving ouroboros state of current thought, not giving a single turd about elegance, coherence, or even its own fandom. If you wish to hold it up against the previous films,…
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Dune 2021
Before anything else, let me just preface this by saying that, unfortunately, while I was watching Dune, I wasn't able to turn off that part of my brain the constantly sought to compare the on-screen narrative to its written counterpart. It's something I personally hate to do, since it actively harms my appreciation of a film as its own artistic beast, but, in this case at least, probably because I reread the book during the summer, I just couldn't stop…
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Cha Cha Real Smooth 2022
Cooper Raiff sometimes can't seem to get out of his damn way. He can be obnoxious, overbearing, overwordy, overquirky, overfuckingeverything. I'm also convinced that if he ever learns to reel it in, he may just become a master of the modern talkie. For more than a few times during its 107 minutes, Cha Cha Real Smooth's felt more real than the real itself. And Dakota Johnson may just have unlocked the full lyrical potential of the word "time" here, because the inflection on her voice *at that moment* (36:33) could ground whole mountains to fine dust.
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Dual 2022
An absolute victory of concept over execution. Not that the latter is ever bad, only frequently uneven, mainly in the first third of the film. But after that, everything -- the ideas, tone, humor, and surprising melancholy of it all -- really begins to gel together into a whole quite unique, so much in fact I'm not sure I've seen done before. Trying to keep it vague in order not to spoil anything, the greatest feat of Dual is the…
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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,…
