Not at all funny but I don't think it's meant to be really. Reminded me of the star-studded disaster epics of the 1970s, just squeezed through the lens of critical farce. Liked how this captures the endless numbing effect that soulless opportunism and greed has on regular people who live outside the corporate/IP/hashtag bubble of modern media. It's really a movie about the point in which we give up, both personally and collectively, and how that freedom from any hope…
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The Worst Person in the World 2021
A little too cute and gimmicky in the first half, but luckily the second hour really gets to the heart of how it takes so much time and experience to work through why we're so damn stubborn and confused.
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The Matrix Resurrections 2021
It's thrilling to be reminded of such big budget filmmaking both aware of its scale and still deeply connected to personal conflicts that are packed with slippery ideas, stunning images, and piercing emotions. I laughed, I cried, I hooted and hollered. What a wonderful, self-aware, and deeply moving blockbuster.
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What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? 2021
"Because everything happened the way it had to happen." Unlike anything I've seen, yet lovingly indebted to rhythms/grace notes of silent cinema, city symphony, rom com, and Manoel de Oliveira. Pure kindness in the face of a brutal world. The best film of the last 3-4 years.
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Last Night in Soho 2021
Starts off really strong but quickly fades. Still, it's nice to see a film with actual cinematic images, lighting, and blocking.
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House of Gucci 2021
Leto and Pacino seem to think they are in a different film, and that is the film I wish I was watching instead of this lifeless, conventional drivel. Kind of unbearable.
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No Time to Die 2021
What an absolute bummer. Craig goes out on a low note film-wise, the audience gets pulled along for such a long time to minimal returns, and the last act is beyond inane. Can't help but think Ana de Armas got hosed here. She steals this thing with only about 15 mins of screen time.
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The Harder They Fall 2021
Really quite something. The anti-Tarantino, the anti-Leone, even as it steals and shreds the styles and tropes those filmmakers stole and shredded from previous generations. Presents Blackness in the Western not as something to be discussed or researched or contemplated, but as a the strong, engaged presence that was always there, a complicated experience shackled to the violence of white supremacy and perpetually trying to break free and defy erasure or worse, complacency.
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Memoria 2021
Sonic rhythms and vibrations reverberating through time, space, bones, and of course, the linkages of memory and lucidity that cannot be explained, only felt. More of an art film than a dream film, and it reminded me of Lisandro Alonso's cinema more than anything else, especially in the final hour that becomes something monumentally great. But still, this is Apichatpong through and through, an exploration of what calls us into the void, into the jungle, into the realm of loud…