It was hard to tell whether this film was brilliant or horrible, but it's because it brought me back to an older style of filmmaking which we’ve abandoned for safer narrative structures that I tenderly accept it as brilliant.
This was one of the most bold films I’ve seen in some time, abstaining from any gimmicks or cheap surprises and shock value which is becoming more and more commonplace. Yes: look at the film straight-on and it's too long, redundant,…
Mysteries are designed to not only engage but involve the audience. However, when the limits of perceivable reality are contorted to far lengths without ever defying set, uniform limitations (AKA "plausible impossibilities"), what may result is a film like "Coherence" -- one that transcends normal inhibitions of low-budget filmmaking. I believe horrors and thrillers within the scope of especially low-budget filmmaking -- the likes of "The Blair Witch Project", "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "Saw", and more recently/accurately, "The Vast of Night"…
I watched Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven the other night, found it very interesting. It’s pretty quickly presumed —even hoped— this film must have an inverted twist on that archetypal, studio-manufactured melodrama it kicks off with. Though I began to find there were no ironic implications of this demonstrative filmmaking approach after waiting for the punchline. (Which was the case in, say, a film like Mulholland Drive, where the point is never completely lost in how much integrity it maintains…
Yorgos Lanthimos is living proof that the brilliant likes of masters like Stanely Kubrick are still possible in 2018. Everywhere from small details like the uncommon motif of a fish eye lens to the more grandiose element of 18th century oil-painting inspired film concerning the battles inside a hierarchy—moreover battles regarding the protagonist who achieved success from rags to riches—also implementing themes like corruption of said power. It also inhabited the same dichotomy of Barry Lyndon, reinvented as it may…
