Reviews
Thoughtful reviews, filed slowly. We write about films we think are worth the trip to the cinema — and occasionally about the ones that are worth skipping.
Dune: Part Two — the Fremen Finally Breathe
Villeneuve's second chapter earns its length. The first Dune was architecture — beautiful, austere, a bit reserved. Part Two is the body inside the building: sweaty, political, a little messy, and gloriously tactile.
Continue reading →Anora, Sean Baker, and Cinema of Attention
What Anora does that no other 2024-25 film does is refuse to look away. Baker keeps the camera on faces long after other directors would have cut. Awkwardness, grief, humiliation — Baker lets them happen in real time.
Continue reading →The Boy and the Heron — Miyazaki's Late Grace
Miyazaki's rumoured final film is a portal fantasy that keeps circling back to grief, to the impossibility of replacing what's been lost. It is not his most coherent film. It might be his most personal.
Continue reading →Anatomy of a Fall — a Marriage Under Oath
Triet's procedural-within-a-procedural is a two-step: a real courtroom case and the slower, crueller autopsy of a marriage beneath it. Sandra Huller is unreasonably good. The dog, yes, the dog — deserves the attention.
Continue reading →Poor Things — Yorgos Unbound
Lanthimos at his most visually deranged. Emma Stone delivers a performance that starts at infant and ends somewhere past self-possession. Not everyone will love it. Those who do will love it a lot.
Continue reading →The Zone of Interest — Silence Across the Wall
Glazer's formal restraint is the film's most moral gesture. You hear, you don't see. You know, but you have to keep knowing. A sound-design achievement the film should be honoured for alone.
Continue reading →The Holdovers — a Christmas Film for Adults
Alexander Payne in his melancholic-warm register. Paul Giamatti, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa trapped in a boarding school at Christmas. Warmer than it sounds. Also genuinely funny.
Continue reading →Past Lives — What We Don't Say
Celine Song's debut is built almost entirely out of what the characters don't say. Greta Lee carries a whole marriage in the set of her shoulders. The last ten minutes are some of the most emotionally honest minutes on screen this year.
Continue reading →Godzilla Minus One — A Monster in Moral Pain
The best Godzilla since the 1954 original. Takashi Yamazaki brings the monster home to postwar Japan and finds grief, survivor's guilt, and a sense of civic purpose. The effects, on a fraction of Hollywood budget, are miraculous.
Continue reading →Killers of the Flower Moon — Scorsese's Slow Burn
Three and a half hours of moral decay, quietly rendered. DiCaprio, De Niro, and — in the film's true performance — Lily Gladstone. A very American film about a very American crime.
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