“I feel like a spectator in my own life. Like I’m playing a supporting role in my own life.”
I try very hard to not get personal in these reviews, going out of my way to avoid referencing myself, but a film like Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World almost demands you to look within and examine your own life while Renate Reinsve’s title character Julie continues to discover her own.
I thought back immediately to 2008 when…
From the opening shot of writer/director/producer Todd Field’s TÁR (2022), the viewer is left unsure of what exactly they are looking at: a woman asleep on what appears to be an airplane, only filmed through a cellular phone while a text conversation is happening simultaneously. This ambiguity is rather fitting, because the acclaimed filmmaker will continue down this route for the film’s duration, though only featuring one more shot set up in this technological voyeuristic framework that opened the proceedings.…
“Every time an old man starts talking about Napoleon, you know they’re going to die.” ~ Roger Sterling of Mad Men
At this rate, director Ridley Scott will either drop dead in the director’s chair or mid sentence while mouthing off to his critics. When I sat down to watch the filmmaker’s latest, it occurred to me that the most recent of his I’d seen was Prometheus (2012) (and only during the original theatrical release), and I was also reminded…
There have been more than a few films over the years that have taken major inspiration from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), possibly my favorite of those cinematic acolytes being Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977), though a more recent example might be something like Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth (2015). The examination of identity as explored by the shared physical (often aquatic or in close proximity to bodies of water) and eventual psychological space of two women, and the inevitable…
Despite being based on a French comic book series from the late ‘90s, the first thing that came to mind while watching the latest from director David Fincher was how we’ve seen versions of this same type of story many times before, from Jean-Pierre Melville to Michael Mann to even someone a little offbeat like Jim Jarmusch attempting it more than once. George Clooney played a variation of this role in The American (2010), and even the title is identical…
Cinematic biopics have been around literally since the dawn of the medium. One could go back to D. W. Griffith’s first sound film Abraham Lincoln to witness an early Hollywood foundation for the popular genre, a film that showcases many of the tropes which would appear over and over again throughout the 20th Century and beyond. How often do these films transcend their formulaic approach of just adding a visual to well known events in a famous person’s life and…
