“‘The Disciple’ can be highly rewarding if one notices and appreciates its technical brilliance. Criticizing the film for its slow pace and aloof camerawork is akin to labeling classical music as boring and tedious.”
“Seidl has produced many scenes of lengthy sexual humiliation or nasty perversion, but they are stories of the world that are drawn from the horrible truth of human behaviour.”
“Sure, ‘Saint Maud’ can be called a horror film, but it is equally a psychological drama that gets a lot of mileage from a tried and true trope: the shifting power dynamics in a superior/subordinate relationship.”
“What do we do with the Teen Agers movies, which were no more intended to be seen 75 years later than a dinner cooked in 1947 was intended to be eaten in 2021?”
“Though somewhat imperfect, Pereira dos Santos’ first feature shows promise and is a testament to his ability to portray queer characters with granular subtlety and political meaning.”
“‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ is heartbreaking and life-affirming in equal measure, which is a difficult balance to pull off, particularly in a movie that frequently treats its protagonist quite harshly.”
“Roger Ebert once wrote ‘it’s not what a film is about, it’s how it is about it,’ and it’s this phrase that I usually return to when thinking about cinema that deals with humanity’s worst impulses.”
“‘Nina Wu’ isn’t just a ‘#MeToo thriller’ or ‘slow burn cinema,’ it’s a progressive spin on psychological horror and a master class in visceral visual design.”
“The utter sadness of Little and Big Edie’s story is why ‘Grey Gardens’ is so moving — direct cinema allowed this story to be explored with a level of intimacy previously unavailable.”
Mannhunting #1 by Bill Bria: “The protagonists and antagonists in Mann’s films tend to be mirror images of each other, all of them caught within masculinity’s shackles.”
“‘No Hard Feelings’ takes queerness as a given, capturing queer joy onscreen while never losing sight of the stark realities of migrants seeking refuge in a still highly xenophobic Europe.”