A quiet miracle of filmmaking, and a wonderful ode to difference and the power of meaningful connection. Only by looking at the past can we understand the present, something which can be said of this beautiful film. It has such a hazy warmth, and feels like a genuine throwback to a simpler era of filmmaking.
One of the best of the year, and feels like a classic already. Can’t wait to show my kids this one day.
Starting tentatively with the anecdote-within-a-novel structure of The Grand Budapest Hotel, then flourishing with the stunning portmanteau The French Dispatch and dizzyingly powerful Asteroid City, Wes Anderson has spent his recent live-action works cultivating a beautiful kind of meta-cinematic naturalism.
It is one which blurs the lines between what is film and theatre. An altogether new kind of genre. A calculated obfuscation of actor and narrator: not even actors, necessarily. Performers? Too pretentious. Does the down-to-earth casualness of it all a disservice.
The…
I spend more time by myself than I do with other people and even though I have friends who I love, I sometimes do wonder (worry?) if the rest of my life is going to be like this; just going from encounter to encounter, passing the days by.
Life can feel very long, but it’s actually very short. And it goes on and on and on, but you blink and whole months have gone by without anything in particular happening.…
Lean, brutal filmmaking. Good Time by way of Halloween.
Perhaps a tad derivative of Taxi Driver, but the grittiness of the decaying Saw-like interiors lends the film a grimy realist edge. Considine is deeply unsettling as Richard, and he has the tendency to deliver his lines with this weird, flat quality. Like he’s talking to children.
Not perfect; I really wanted less of the scumbags (the only thing which dates the film, to be honest) and more of Richard, but the story is told with such straightforward bluntness that it’s difficult not to get sucked into this dark, hopeless world. This is how real stories are told.
A little bit shattered by this deceptively intelligent look at loneliness, urban isolation and the strain distance can have on friendship. A little girl down the row was sobbing and I wasn't far off.
My biggest surprise of the festival so far: kind of awed by this.
Surprisingly low-key, with a few flourishes of visceral violence punctuating a drolly episodic samurai flick which nonetheless manages to feel legitimately gripping in its own weird, deadpan way.
A sequence of low-key encounters purposely jogging towards a disappointingly quiet - if tonally and structurally perfect - ending. But it all works to paint an image of a world in which even slaughter has been reduced to the status of transaction, and human lives are simply nodes in a vast network…
