"Serge Bozon’s follow-up to Madame Hyde (2017), Don Juan seems to continue that film’s revisionist update of a classic tale, while also returning in some fashion to the unorthodox musical genre that La France (2007) so brilliantly embodied. Here, the connection is much more narratively explicit: Laurent (Tahar Rahim), an actor who has been left at the altar by his fellow actor Julie (Virginie Efira), begins to see her face in nearly every woman he meets, before she comes back…
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A New Old Play 2021
"Without getting too far into Bresson’s dissection of the irreconcilable differences between the artistic media of film and theater, there has been a longstanding interest, and thus conundrum, in how to depict the staging of a theatrical production on film. From Busby Berkeley backstage musicals to The Golden Coach to Rivette’s masterpieces to Vanya on 42nd Street to, of course, Drive My Car, films about theater are typically just as much about the communal nature of the endeavor, the relationships…
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Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022
"I don’t usually like to make my life and background the focus of my reviews, since my general inclinations are to let my observations assume their personality from what I choose to write about and to not interfere with the text itself. But Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once begs for me to consider it in light of this. There are certain aspects of myself that, for various reasons, I can’t bring into this piece, but suffice…
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Crazy Rich Asians 2018
"Crazy Rich Asians otherwise has no time or inclination to explore anything traditional in Asian culture unless it is explicitly related to the plot in a way intended to draw out the nigh-villainous qualities of the Youngs. The movie’s most fundamental and detrimental demerit is its frequent flattening of characters and centuries-old practices into one-dimensional stereotypes, conflating so many different attributes so as to create something muddled and more than a little offensive."
Reviewed this repulsive, shallow film for The Film Stage. I got a little mad.
