This is an eight-minute short film from Italian director Alice Rohrwacher posted on MUBI. I don't usually write reviews on short films. I watch them. I log them on Letterboxd. Boom. But I felt the need to write one on this. The film was shot in April 2020 during the early months of the pandemic. Alice took an old camera, an old film and a zoom lens and went around filming her neighbors, socially distanced, in the Italian countryside where…

An unemployed architect is roped in by a beautiful femme fatale into a seemingly on the up and up real estate business proposition but ends up seducing him into an adulterous affair. Watching this B-noir film, it honestly feels like it was cobbled together from parts of better classic film noirs. It made me think, "Hmmm. Maybe I should watch that or that or that." A young (and I must say, pretty hot) Angela Lansbury plays the femme fatale role…

Whoah. This is an intense, exhilarating (just like the blurb in the posters say) film. An ambitious young jazz drummer gets tormented both physically, psychologically and emotionally by a brutal teacher who pushes him beyond his limits in order to realize his full potential and achieve greatness. What follows is not an emotional, feel-good inspiring tale (well, not-so-much) but a brutally honest examination of what it means to achieve one's ambitions. The buzz around JK Simmons' performance is well-earned, IMO…