Nothing in this world is fair.
A Hero is a movie about prisons. I mean that literally: it is a film about a man who has been incarcerated over a large, ongoing debt. It's also true in many other senses, as Farhadi's script explores how external emotional and cultural forces evolve into internal psychological and sociological prisons. Debt is a prison for the man who owes and the man who is owed, and a prison for everyone who loves either…
Oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence
You can check out a full version of my thoughts on this film available here!
Kurosawa. Welles. Polanski. Kurzel. And now Coen. The lineup of auteurs, screenwriters, formalists and dreamweavers who have taken a crack at The Scottish Play runs long, and it begs a pointed question of just, what is the point of dipping the…
Tyrannosaur is an intermittently thoughtful examination of forgiveness and those acts which should not be forgiven. There are also sincerely thorny and well acted depictions of masculinity, but in all, I found the whole miserable onslaught to be more overbearing than enlightening. Made me wish for Mike Leigh, an English director who makes characters just like these come alive with greater dimension and emotional depth.
Continuing his streak of explosive and confrontational depictions of the lives of sex workers, Sean Baker's Red Rocket is the story of aging pornstar and hustler, Mikey Saber. The film begins and ends with Mikey strutting around his hometown of Texas City, having been booted from his LA residence under inauspicious circumstances. What follows is a series of reunions and episodes between the residents of the town and their homegrown celebrity dirtbag. The movie deftly weaves through complex and tonally…
Christopher Nolan is here to save cinema as we know it the only way he knows how, and in a way only his most fanatical devotees could love - an expensive looking, action-stuffed James Bond pastiche with funky video game mechanics. This movie has exactly two modes: ceaseless exposition and loud, convoluted setpieces, yet no matter how didactically it explains its physics to you, the mechanics never come close to making sense. It's horribly apropos that a third of the…
