Astounding incompetence! A terrible story realized without a shred of craft or passion. I'll admit there's something genuinely interesting about the idea of Chiwetel Ejiofor raging against a god that cursed a select few humans with eternal souls, all of them destined to be reborn again and again with the memories of all previous lives intact. But it's almost as if the movie goes out of its way to circumvent that part of the narrative. Instead, what we get is…
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
-
The Wolf of Wall Street 2013
A movie for and of our time in more ways than Scorsese could have ever predicted. I suspect it's one of the most low-key seminal films of the last decade. It's no Goodfellas or Taxi Driver—none of its images or narrative beats have penetrated into the zeitgeist like those films—but it's had an enduring impact on the way filmmakers tell stories about white-collar crime and financial scams: laced with cynicism, stepping back and forth across the fourth wall, reveling in…
Popular reviews
More-
Eyes of Fire 1983
Eyes of Fire tells a phantasmagorical tale of settler colonialism, religious zealotry, and the boundless mysteries of the natural world with the lightest of touches. You'd be forgiven for mistaking this for a made-for-TV educational film about US colonial history—that is, up until mud-caked ghouls commune with a malevolent forest demon and start grafting human faces onto a tree. It's a vaporous narrative, suffused with paranoia and dissolving from one uncanny encounter to the next without ever bogging itself down…
-
Earwig 2021
Once again, Lucile Hadžihalilović hits the ground dreaming with ambivalent caretakers and an almost overwhelming number of signifiers. Earwig is, for all its stillness, always in flux, caught between a fairy tale and a horror film, and routinely soaked in otherworldly postwar malaise. Every frame is a stunning collage of greens, ambers, and reds—and don't even get me started on the exterior shots, which make incredible use of texture and pattern. You can almost smell the rain, run your fingers…
