“Rossellini astonishingly blends the good and the bad into an imperfect merging of society in all its multiplicity of guises. Death, desolation and violence are as pervasive in the film as love and empathy.”
“Fantasy exists to create a place of greater safety, a rejection of the real world in favour of one that allows for an open, unapologetic queerness.”
“A great magician never reveals his tricks, and Soderbergh far too nakedly shows the craft in ‘The Laundromat,’ whereas a narrower focus, with the human consequence of the Panama Papers in clear sight, could have beguiled, incited and entertained in equal measure.”
“‘Ad Astra’ joins the likes of ‘Gravity’ and ‘Interstellar’ as one of Stanley Kubrick’s starchildren.”
“By experiencing Almodóvar’s films as the product of a man whose view of the world is deeply affected by a variety of nagging medical concerns, only a few late period works thoroughly scratch under the surface of his psyche.”
“No matter what one pulls from Kon’s work, there’s no denying his lasting impact and innate ability to immediately render a viewer speechless.”
“Throughout both the foreground and background of ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Truffaut emphasizes the characters’ self-absorption via a hyper-sexual form of narcissism in a society lacking real love.”
“‘The Box’ elevates the daily minutiae of capitalist cruelty into the science fiction moral framework of a ‘Twilight Zone’ yarn.”
“‘Parasite’ takes a left turn that’s so hard yet so appropriate that it’s like watching a spectacularly executed high wire act.”
“For a filmmaker usually so concerned with the social causes of injustice, ‘The Offence’ is remarkably focused on the troubled psychology of its central character.”
“Nothing about ‘Ford v Ferrari’ reeks of studio interference, perhaps owing to the fact that the script hews so closely to screenwriting conventions that worked well for decades.”
“A collaboration between a Chinese-American director and a Korean-American writer, ‘Coming Home Again’ is an exemplar of minimal styling that shows that what is essentially human surpasses the boundary of what is ethnic and cultural.”
“Johnson loves whodunits so much that he racked his brain to think 10 steps ahead of the audience so that he could hoodwink them to serve the goal of establishing the genre’s viability in the present day, all while staying true to its classic roots.”
“For a story that engages with tough, thorny questions of redemption and reconciliation, it’s a welcome development to have a filmmaker look upwards, not inwards.”
Bait Movie Interview: Vague Visages’ Jim Ross discusses the 2019 drama film with writer-director Mark Jenkin.
“While ‘High Flying Bird’ may seem uneven at first glance, one has to appreciate that Soderbergh directly addresses controversial societal topics that always touch a nerve in America.”
“In Malick’s effort to capture the alienation that accompanies modernity, in his contemporary-set films, he ultimately achieves a similar alienation cinematically.”
“Today, what survives is a film of exquisite poise, of fleshly tenderness against concrete cruelty, an evocative warmth against the coldness of Joan’s formidable suffering.”
“An efficient script and commanding central performance from Sarah Bolger produce a memorable film with mostly intelligently drawn characters.”
“‘Animals’ doesn’t definitively answer it’s feminist question. I’m glad it doesn’t. Rather than making a film about the merits of giving up drink or ditching the guy, Hyde navigates somewhere far more raw.”