Keeps threatening to tip over and become another in that recent run of murkily generic, punishingly grim Eastern European crime dramas that have commented, however obliquely, on the merciless free-for-all that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union; a clutch of region-specific references have the effect of keeping us at a distance. Yet there are equally elements that intrigue and fascinate... Much is thrown open to interpretation, but the overarching idea was perhaps to reframe Ukraine, as a country that…
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Return to Seoul 2022
Park has been afforded an uncommon freedom to roam (within shots, between personas): it's on fullest display in the mid-film dance sequence that is at once an assertion of independence and quasi-training montage. In a previously sedate bar, Freddy rolls up her sleeves, exposes her biceps and throws rhythmic punches, egging herself on, deaf to or defying the song's plaintive refrain ("You can't make it alone"). The character remains in motion throughout these two hours, but the film around her…
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Tenet 2020
The film that confirms Nolan no longer has any interest in human beings beyond assets on a poster or dots on a diagram... Visually and spiritually grey, it's too terse to relax and have a moment's fun with its premise; it's a caper for shut-ins, which may not stop it from becoming a runaway smash.
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Beginning 2020
Strikingly composed and rehearsed: it has to be, given the nature of some of those atrocities. Yet like a lot of films by young filmmakers who've seen a lot of films (and a lot of the New Extreme Cinema, in particular), it appears, scene by scene, utterly removed from life as it's actually experienced by real, non-movie, flesh-and-blood people; from first frame to last, we're watching terrible things happening to crash-test-dummy characters in one of those rigorously self-sealed art-movie vacuums.
