A whole movie built around handwringing over whether children born of obscene wealth could ever be Not Evil...may have gone down a bit smoother if the film didn't doddle back and forth in the middle stretch as if the verdict were ever in doubt (yes, those kids are evil! They're not even trying to hide it!). Still, a well-told airport novel that only occasionally gets its hands dirty with deeply spiteful Korean melodrama. Most compelling as a tale where two…
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Evil Does Not Exist 2023
Could have done without the first half-hour, all bone-dry set-up presented plainly just so it can surely be subverted in the latter half. Not much to return to there. Leans into Hamaguchi's pop-cinema strengths once we finally get out of all that solitude and into the characters speaking and bouncing off each other - I can't even dress it up, I love how this guy writes.
Captures a very particular foulness in the air right now, even better than THE…
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Midsommar 2019
At a Q&A afterwards, Aster remarked that he only had these two horror films banked among his old screenplays and otherwise had a lot of other genres in mind he's eager to tackle. It's kind of incredible he doesn't have hundreds of more horror films banked though because thus far, they're incredibly interchangeable. It's almost stunning how much this plays like a Madlibs version of HEREDITARY (or vice versa) and yet somehow gets even more of a pass from certain…
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Crimes of the Future 2022
Been a moment since there was a sci-fi picture that didn't take place either in our distant future or a long, long time ago. Shot in all of the parts of Greece that look haunted yet thoroughly lived-in (just out of sight of the nearest McDonald's, I imagine), CRIMES OF THE FUTURE crafts its own delightfully distinct moral universe separate from our own, without judgment or sanctimonious reverence. A willingness to be voyeuristic is all it asks of its audience…
