Resin is a film that sounds better on paper. This isn’t to say it’s a bad film; it’s shot with a dreamy softness, and its superficial idyllic atmosphere gives it a distinct aesthetic. Still derivative of every other isolated-descent-into-madness films, it takes the typical “living in the woods psychologically affects children” story, and makes it…
The Dardenne brothers are two of the greatest modern filmmakers. Their films are consistently bursting with compassion, with their sharp focus on naturalism able to generate unbelievable amounts of tension and pathos out of premises that seem relatively mundane on paper – if you had told me a movie about a woman individually begging her…
There’s something so comforting about walking into a theater and walking out of it two hours later with the exact same head on your shoulders. These films that deliberately avoid the destruction and reconstruction of the soul that comes from great art, instead focusing on a simple reiteration of what one comes to expect from…
If you can only see one 2019 period piece foreign film about the connection between two women constantly being battered by patriarchal expectations that features a portrait of a lady that happens to be on fire…well, you should still watch Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but I highly doubt there will be another one…
Anthony McCarten, screenwriter of The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour, and Bohemian Rhapsody, has returned this year to pen the Netflix biographical drama, The Two Popes, and reteams with his most faithful collaborator, the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page about his subject. Like McCarten’s other films, The Two Popes is generally entertaining even if…
Autobiographical films are like a form of artistic therapy, and often their value is dependent on the audience’s ability to connect their own personal experiences with those being portrayed. Some are engrossing, like this year’s The Souvenir, where Joanna Hogg presents semi-disconnected moments of her life that play out like an elliptical collage of memories.…
Sue me, it’s sweet. Netflix’s 2019 drunken shout into the void to say “listen up chucklefucks it’s Christmas time,” Let It Snow, following four interconnected stories of high schoolers trying to navigate love and the future on Christmas Eve in a small town, is the sort of movie that ends with Joan Cusack’s narration saying…
Though still far from having equal representation in front of the camera (and even further behind it), recent years have seen an increase in the amount of big budget films led by women. I see this as a step in the right direction- cinema should be more varied and all stories should be told- but…
Investigative journalism films directly appeal to me, mostly because I love movies about everyday people being good at what they do for a living – the first horse training sequence in The Rider brought me to tears, for instance. I was excited for The Report, because it bears most of the genre’s conventions, but also…
I’d love to say The Lighthouse is an ambitious failure – that Robert Eggers tried to tap into something heady, existential, or even primal, and just wound up coming up short. If only it were a thematic or narrative mess, or an admirable but flawed attempt at provocation that unfortunately missed the mark. Instead, Eggers’…
Cinema Etc. 