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#16
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![]() 2. Moonfall, grade D = Very bad sci-fi movie, stupid plot. There are some very good special affects and Halle Berry gives a pretty good performance, but don't waste your money. The movie isn't paced well and I couldn't wait to leave.
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#17
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![]() 10.Texas Chainsaw Massacre (9) (David Blue Garcia); grade: B
Like Brady Corbet’s art-film masterwork Vox Lux, Garcia’s B-movie TCM retcon launches its broad socio-political analysis from the trauma of school-shooting survivor’s guilt and the psychological specificity of sisters. The social tensions go beyond fake binary political paradigms. Garcia winds them so tightly that when the scary-and-funny slasher gore commences it feels like relief. In other words, Garcia confronts his characters with the moral dilemma they try to escape. Garcia complicates the “final girl” trope with ambivalent politically-loaded imagery of a phallic assault rifle and chainsaw. Those unable to comprehend such complexity and contradiction—humanity!—are doomed sheeple to the slaughterhouse.
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"They love each other so much, they think they hate each other." Imagine paying $1000 to hear "Don't Dream It's Over" instead of "Go Your Own Way" Fleetwood Mac helped me through a time of heartbreak. 12 years later, they broke my heart. Last edited by TrueFaith77; 02-19-2022 at 10:52 AM.. |
#18
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#19
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![]() 3. Death on the Nile, grade C- = The movie is beautifully shot, but poorly directed. There are some great scenes of the nile river and Egypt but the movie is choppy and doesn't really flow. Also, they changed the story and added a bunch of politically correct elements that make the movie far fetched. It just didn't quite work and the ending is not shocking at all. It was a big disappointment.
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#20
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![]() 11.The Batman (Matt Reeves); grade: F
#TheBatman bastardizes Chinatown in the incoherent style of 80s Euro-trash ad men Scott, Figgis, Lyne. Essentially, it peddles Fascism. Note: GOAT Batfleck always struck in the face of imminent danger—but Battinson just disregards the Constitution to bootlicking applause. Best moment: Batman and Selina’s motorcycle wheels hum in harmony—actors offscreen, it’s their sexiest interaction. The film ruins it with Selina’s cri de gurre about white male privilege that I think was supposed to be funny/ironic (as she unknowingly delivers it to Bruce Wayne), but the audience lapped it up with the grave seriousness encouraged by hack Matt Reeves. The music score’s sentimental use of “Ave Maria” (the name of Catwoman’s mother) just continues the culture’s ruinous misunderstanding of the profound “Martha” revelation in Zack Snyder’s Batman V Superman.
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"They love each other so much, they think they hate each other." Imagine paying $1000 to hear "Don't Dream It's Over" instead of "Go Your Own Way" Fleetwood Mac helped me through a time of heartbreak. 12 years later, they broke my heart. Last edited by TrueFaith77; 03-04-2022 at 06:30 AM.. |
#21
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![]() 12.The Invisible Thread (Marco Simon Puccioni); grade: B
“Our marriage is a farce!” declares Paolo (the great Filippo Timi!) as his 20th anniversary celebration with husband Simone (Francesco Scianna) descends hilariously-then-heartbreakingly into a domestic catastrophe caused by infidelity. At the center of this Italian farce is Paulo and Simone’s son Leonne (Francesco Gheghi), whose autobiographical activist school film project further complicates matters as it depends on Pablo and Simone’s upstanding representation of the gay-marriage cause. Hence, Puccioni always yo-yo’s between feeling and hilarity, the individual and the social, the private and the public. As questions about his family stability and the legal implications of his DNA paternity swirl, Paulo explores his compassion and his sexuality with gorgeous fraternal twins Elisa (Alessia Giuliani) and Dario (Matteo Oscar Giuggioli). He and Elisa flirt by brandishing hipster pop t-shirts; Dario kisses Paulo on a cliff. As with Timi’s hilarious embodiment of a middle-aged bourgeois gay man (on the brink of hysteria), these are the kinds of universal experiences that Europeans get right—including the identity of Paulo’s father. Essentially progressive, Puccioni’s farce resolves itself not through familial reconciliation but through the imagery of nature-and-nurture as an invisible thread of love through the generations that results in one unique person. The dignity afforded to which all politics must be based.
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"They love each other so much, they think they hate each other." Imagine paying $1000 to hear "Don't Dream It's Over" instead of "Go Your Own Way" Fleetwood Mac helped me through a time of heartbreak. 12 years later, they broke my heart. |
#22
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![]() 13.Scream (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin; Tyler Gillett); grade: F
Now, the meta conceit of the Scream series turns the characters into mere consumers. The film’s consumerist conflict establishes a false binary between toxic fandom (the killers) and consumer acquiescence (the victims). The film’s first victim prefers “elevated horror” junk like The Babadook and—God help us—Hereditary. (With taste that awful, she has it coming.) Meanwhile, the filmmakers’ lack of series progenitor Wes Craven’s craft and emotional intensity (what the characters call “stakes”) lowers audience standards. They ineptly stage the killings. Suspense and scares rely entirely on loud music and whip pans. The filmmakers reduce the significance of adventurous actress Neve Campbell (Investigating Sex, The Company, When Will I Be Loved). It’s ideological murder.
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"They love each other so much, they think they hate each other." Imagine paying $1000 to hear "Don't Dream It's Over" instead of "Go Your Own Way" Fleetwood Mac helped me through a time of heartbreak. 12 years later, they broke my heart. |
#23
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![]() 14.Don’t Look Down (Jacques Martineau, Olivier Ducastel): grade: B+
Covidpocalypse colors Martineau-Ducastel’s Don’t Look Down, by filmmakers known for the Demy-inspired gay-lib, AIDS-era existential romanticism of masterpieces Paris 05:59: Theo & Hugo, My Life on Ice, and Adventures of Felix. Instead, this film’s isolation setting features 5 victims in a high-rise apartment who persecute an off-screen menace. Instead of sexual freedom, Martineau-Ducastel explore the spiritual toll of exploitative sexual-romantic relationships. As the characters take turns confronting their mutual tormentor, they divulge their sexual fantasies (domination/submission) and their real humiliations (public manipulations). Recalling similar ventures by Bunuel, Fassbinder, Ozon, the activist French filmmaking duo explore power dynamics in bourgeois norms—an insight into how gay shame and female subjugation manifest in supposedly liberated relationships. Even spatially constrained, Martineau-Ducastel always prove cinematic. The charged off-screen space, the camera exploring others’ reactions to monologues, blocks of neon color, and dance/musical interludes express moral perspectives and individual feeling. The film reaches its visual-emotional peak when a character longs for purity while a cloudy sunrise reflects on the image of the 5 characters in search of revenge, control, and healing. Martineau-Ducastel silhouette them in the morning light of compassion.
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"They love each other so much, they think they hate each other." Imagine paying $1000 to hear "Don't Dream It's Over" instead of "Go Your Own Way" Fleetwood Mac helped me through a time of heartbreak. 12 years later, they broke my heart. |
#24
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![]() 15.Guermantes (Christophe Honore): grade: B-
“Boo! Self-indulgent bull****!” screamed a man at a Lincoln Center screening of the new Honore film. I think the film’s unorthodox perspective on COVID got under the New Yorker’s skin. Honore, playing himself, refuses to make his art a “slave” to COVID. Yet Honore feeds the trolls with a seemingly unfocused narrative—the improvised fictional bts of a real-life theatrical production of Proust at the Comedie Francaise. The most interesting rehearsal is a gay interpretation of Cyrano de Bergerac, which synchs with the best improvised scenes (Honore’s one night stand with a student actor, two older gay men arguing about a young lover). The taste of Dominique Blanc’s presence (big eyes, mischievous smile) in the troupe acts as a Proustian madeleine, an emotional and cultural slipstream recalling the late Patrice Chereau’s Queen Margot and Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train. This last inspired Honore’s own AIDS-era catharsis in Sorry, Angel. With Guermantes, Honore explores the personal and political impulses behind the artists that covidpocalypse challenges to find meaning and achieve catharsis.
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"They love each other so much, they think they hate each other." Imagine paying $1000 to hear "Don't Dream It's Over" instead of "Go Your Own Way" Fleetwood Mac helped me through a time of heartbreak. 12 years later, they broke my heart. Last edited by TrueFaith77; 03-16-2022 at 06:42 AM.. |
#25
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![]() 16.Panama (Mark Neveldine); grade: D
Neveldine strives for integrity in the realm of the low-budget action. In a glorified cameo, Mel Gibson articulates the film’s termite-like morality, hard-boiled existentialism burrowing through international politics in the 1980s centered around the Sandinistas and the Contras in Nicaragua. The drawn-out narrative features a rogues gallery of spooks and narcs who talk-talk and kiss-kiss, not much bang-bang. Budgetary constraints limit opportunities for Neveldine’s visceral wit and kinetics that reached surreal heights in his collabs with Brian Taylor (Crank, Crank 2: High Voltage, Gamer, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance). A sequence in which the Contras play their weapons like musical instruments accompanying a rap song gets undercut because there is no music on the soundtrack! Strangely, Neveldine’s compromised integrity leaves me remembering it more fondly than I experienced it in the theater.
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"They love each other so much, they think they hate each other." Imagine paying $1000 to hear "Don't Dream It's Over" instead of "Go Your Own Way" Fleetwood Mac helped me through a time of heartbreak. 12 years later, they broke my heart. |
#26
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![]() 4. The Batman, grade B = I liked the art direction, the acting and most of the story, but this movie was way too long. They should of shaved 45 minutes off from this movie. This movie really concentrates on Batman as a Detective, which other movies don't. The version of the Riddler and Penguin are excellent. I also like Cat Woman. However, I can't sit through this again. It could of been a lot better if it were tighter.
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#27
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![]() 5. X, grade B+ = This is one of the most original horror, slasher films I've seen in years. It's very grind house and takes place in 1979. A group of people rent a cabin to make a porn movie and then the killing starts. It's very well made and I feel the killers are unique. I'm definitely going to purchase this.
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#28
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![]() 20.Nitram (Justin Kurzel): grade: A
The title cards at the end of Nitram resonate more deeply than activist-filmmaking addendum to the true-story of Australia’s most deadly mass shooting and subsequent gun control legislation. Kurzel deploys many aesthetic devices to expand the cultural implications of this character study. A shot of conflicted mother Judy Davis reflected in a window superimposed over a tv news program perfectly visualizes Kurzel’s conflation of the intimate and the objective, the personal and the national. As the titular son, Caleb Landry Jones reaches out painfully for human connection. Pain is Kurzel’s subject, the emotional wavelength of cruelly nicknamed Nitram. He calls himself “slow” but his name is backwards. His introspection exposes profound alienation (when this wild child wears a suit, he looks like a clown). Palpable pain defines Jones’s interactions with Judy Davis (who explains her maternal ambivalence), Kurzel’s wife Eddie Davis (an eccentric who introduces Nitram to Gilbert & Sullivan), and his father Anthony LaPaglia (nuzzling up to his son after a mental breakdown). As 4 outsiders (plus pretty surfer Sean Keenan dramatizing a culture’s insensitivity), this cast proves worthy of Mike Leigh troupe’s politically incisive theatricality. Only Leigh was never this tender or brutal, thanks to Kurzel’s completely unsentimental mastery. Handheld shallow focus alternates with deep-focus tracking shots, Australian topography contextualizes kinetic sequences of a car crash and surfing. All of it exemplifying Kurzel’s crystalline lighting. Take that, Kubrick!
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"They love each other so much, they think they hate each other." Imagine paying $1000 to hear "Don't Dream It's Over" instead of "Go Your Own Way" Fleetwood Mac helped me through a time of heartbreak. 12 years later, they broke my heart. Last edited by TrueFaith77; 03-31-2022 at 10:30 PM.. |
#29
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![]() 22.Morbius (Daniel Espinosa); grade: B
Morbius breaks the MCU rules by being fun. If the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies were fun, they would not exact the full demonstration of consumerist fealty that greets each new release—until now. Fun 1: The action scenes get increasingly exciting, visually imaginative (especially the bat-sonar VFX), and scary, sexy, emotional. Fun 2: The rollercoaster thrills depend on a Robin Wood-like understanding of monsters as simultaneously repulsive and attractive, especially as embodied by Jared Leto’s gaunt body tumescently transformed by bat juice and articulated by Matt Smith: “You pitied me before; you are repulsed by me now.” (Smith and Leto are terrific!) Fun 3: The flashback that establishes the psycho-familial bonds connecting the characters also affords shock and poignancy to the subsequent betrayals (“You gave me my name!”). Instead of MCU films usual spiritually gnostic (Dr. Strange), politically divisive (Civil War), ideologically Fascist (Endgame), cinematically televisual (all of them), Morbius exposes the sentimental underpinnings of MCU Nietzschean entertainment (the significance of Leto and Smith’s mantra: “The few against the many”). Faint praise, but Morbius is easily the best MCU movie. It imparts fun like the spiritually reviving exchange of blood between the film’s lovers. Yes, a fear of sex explains the infantilized Morbius haters.
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"They love each other so much, they think they hate each other." Imagine paying $1000 to hear "Don't Dream It's Over" instead of "Go Your Own Way" Fleetwood Mac helped me through a time of heartbreak. 12 years later, they broke my heart. Last edited by TrueFaith77; 04-02-2022 at 08:42 PM.. |
#30
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![]() 17.Deep Water (Adrian Lynne); grade: F
18.Master (Mariama Diallo); grade: F 19.7 Days (Roshan Sethi); grade: D 21.Better Nate Than Ever (Tim Federle); grade: D 23.Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels); grade F Like the careerist, sentimental (ok, I cried, I’m easy) Better Nate Than Ever, Everything Everywhere All at Once—the most highly acclaimed movie of 2022—exploits familial responses to queer kids. But the conspiracy spanning infinite universes in EEAAO connects queer identity and hetero-tolerance to a metaphysic of moral relativism (and existentialism to mere career choices). It links the mother’s acceptance to its rejection of Creation-as-an-articulation-of-infinite-Love (in one one alternate universe, humans evolve with hot dogs for fingers). Similarly, 7 Days conflates COVID isolation with courtship and flubs its rom-com climax—an indie film aesthetic that the A24-distributed EEAAO shares (both films are visually and dramatically drab). EEAAO’s Kung Fu choreography lacks the impact and clarity of even hokey Hong Kong cinema much less compared to masters Zhang, Chen, Chow—so its immigration story comes off as appropriation. Incoherent genre filmmaking like Deep Water or Master reveals that the fun of movies gets replaced today by the satisfaction of bias confirmation whether it’s nihilistic trash of the former or the paranoid mash-up of grievance and horror tropes of the latter. If EEAAO establishes one’s truest responses as merely arbitrary, then the only acceptable response is to conform to authority. It reduces the complexity of mother-daughter love to a struggle session.
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"They love each other so much, they think they hate each other." Imagine paying $1000 to hear "Don't Dream It's Over" instead of "Go Your Own Way" Fleetwood Mac helped me through a time of heartbreak. 12 years later, they broke my heart. |
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