This viewing drove home how emotionally similar to Vertigo this is…
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Porcelain War 2024
A Ukraine documentary about the nobility of creating art during wartime. It really hammers its metaphors home in a way that ultimately felt reductive. There’s a cute dog, I guess, but not very impactful, given the stakes.
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Little Death 2024
Bifurcated drug abuse drama with two distinct halves. I liked both on their own terms, but the less stylistically overloaded second half, featuring an excellent performance from Talia Ryder, stuck with me more. Set over one crazy night, it has the energy of Liman’s Go, and with its chaotic spirit and excellent soundtrack it would have easily been able to stand on its own. Appended, as it is, to the cynical and surreal first half (which has good work from Jena Malone, Abby Hoffman, and David Schwimmer), it’s going to be a bit underappreciated.
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Realm of Satan 2024
Not really much of a narrative, but instead of series of staged tableaus that feature members of the Church of Satan flaunting their very refined aesthetic style. The film isn’t really illuminating about their beliefs, instead focusing on their external presentations to the world. I was very curious to see what the film would show me next (and it plays with the documentary form, sometimes using special effects to add to the sense of the occult), but the overall impact is reduced from there not being much of a clear perspective.
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Stress Positions 2024
A satire of the Brooklyn liberal mindset that drops tons of buzzwords and asks you to find it funny that characters use words like “digestif.” I was surprised how much I liked this, given that all of the characters were pretty unlikeable and that the COVID lockdown setting was mostly uncomfortable. There are some strange scripting choices (e.g. the excessive voiceover) that sap the energy from the rest of the film, but when it captures the insanity of close quarters…
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Kneecap 2024
An entertaining biopic of a Belfast musical group that’s very much in the spirit and style of Trainspotting. I didn’t have much use for the actual music that they performed, but there’s something going on here between the film’s punk ethos which claims that it doesn’t care about its political backdrop and its inability to escape it. The band members play themselves, and they acquit themselves well as actors.
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Between the Temples 2024
Wonderful. An ace ensemble is employed to maximum effect in this off-kilter romantic drama. The film captures the social mores and shaggy style of ‘70s films far more effectively than The Holdovers did, with all of its nervous energy coming through in each edit and camera movement and its transgressive spirit becoming increasingly dominant with each scene until it peaks with a screwball Shabbat dinner. Loved, loved, loved this.
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Sugarcane 2024
Sets out to give a moral reckoning to the atrocities inflicted upon indigenous populations by the Residential Homes programs in the US and Canada. While there’s plenty of evidence of wrongdoing and plenty of opportunity for viewers to be frustrated, there’s not really much catharsis here. Part of this is because the systems of power have only offered ceremonial apologies for the decades of abuse and part of that is because the generations of victims are so obviously traumatized that…
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A Real Pain 2024
Eisenberg gets what he’s going for in this small-scale drama about two once-close cousins. As they tour Poland, they do less to confront historical horrors than to develop the language to address their own mental health. The screenplay finds enough humor to lighten the mood, without ever losing sight of the emotional stakes for this differently dysfunctional duo, but I’m not sure that it ever really grapples with just how callous it is to use this backdrop to explore these…
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How to Have Sex 2023
Seems eager to be blunt about the messiness of issues like sexual consent and feminine desire, but it feels so predigested that there’s really no gray area to ponder. Much better in its cautiously hedonistic first half.
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Thelma 2024
Squibb, getting a lead role at 94, is fun… an awards campaign waiting to happen. Unfortunate that the film supporting her unfolds with fairly lame sitcom logic, time and again making her character’s mere age the primary joke Noticeably spotty direction, as well, with the overdone expressions and telegraphed action beats of a mediocre student film. Not unwatchable, since it’s so novel to see an actress like Squibb carrying things, but definitely not exceptional.
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Seeking Mavis Beacon 2024
Presents itself as a quest to find the face of the popular typing program, but really becomes much more wide-ranging. The two filmmakers, both young women of color, become the real subjects, getting so invested in Beacon because they are trying to understand how they formed into the individuals that they became. The work has the DIY energy of the early days of the internet and replaces strict historical fact with leaps of queer imagination, essentially turning the archive’s lack into opportunities for self-realization and even spiritual connection. Probably more interesting in its failures that it would have been were it fully realized.