Something about the way Reichardt imagines a minor art opening as some especially ridiculous microcosm of all the ridiculously imperfect ways we’re able to be with and try to support one another. Maybe no one could ever really truly understand Lizzy’s private passions, what drives her as she works so intently in her garage studio late into the night crafting her tortured feminine figurines with such tender loving care. “You took a pigeon to the vet?” And yet, they all…
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Bamako 2006
“Words are something, they can seize you in the heart. It’s bad if you keep them inside!” A righteously furious cri de coeur for all those in the global south left abandoned and underdeveloped by the neocolonialist systems and institutions designed for nothing but to keep power exactly where it is. In a country with some of the world’s richest gold deposits but whose women have no gold jewelry to wear, a Brechtian dream of literally putting on trial those…
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Titane 2021
Clearly, I’m in the minority here, but it’s the sort of transgressive provocation I just find incredibly dull, if not flat-out useless. As with Raw before it, the sensationalist genre trappings just become a way for Ducournau to avoid having to try to say anything about any emotional depths she might’ve wandered into. Indeed, literally nothing of either Alexia’s narrative trajectory or Vincent’s emotional awakening would change at all if her baby had been made of flesh and blood instead…
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Friends and Strangers 2021
The best new young-people-going-through-vaguely-defined-shit film I’ve seen in years; if Vaughan largely leaves the reasons for Ray and Alice’s stuntedness – professional, romantic, emotional – only hinted at, numerous casual reminders of Australia’s aboriginal and colonial origins point to some more widespread malaise amid all the self-indulgent millennial comfort. Past failures that haven’t been fully reckoned with, future roadmaps not yet drawn, a present dominated by so many forgotten histories, useless digressions, missed cues, and false starts. “We’ll just have…
