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34 entries tagged favorite
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Another World
It is by all means both narratively ambitious and visually stunning, if not occasionally messy, but for most of its duration this film is just so bleak, I don't think I could actually recommend this to anyone.
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The Invite
I went in blind, more or less expecting a slightly more satirical Marriage Story (2019) so this was a fun surprise.
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Erupcja
Nice little character study exploring the immediate surrounding impact of someone that mythologizes their own emotional immaturity and fear of commitment.
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The President's Cake
Bleak, borderline nihilistic even, the backdrop of the film is more interested in the direct failures of the Saddam regime than offering any substantial critique of the American imperialist structure that had driven the region into desolation and was actively bombing it (presented instead as an always present inevitability); in turn making the film particularly palatable to a western audience that can consume it within the comfort of any ideology without being overly challenged.
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The Legend of Hei II
Maybe I'm reading too much into this but it feels like a metaphor for geopolitical tension and arguments for peaceful co-existence and mutual cooperation between China and the west.
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El Sett
Making a biopic of a pan-Arabic legend, whose rich career spanned over 70 years, while navigating both the personal and the rapid political and socioeconomic developments of Egypt, is no easy feat, and the end result is good; it is touching, entertaining, captivating.
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The Lost Bus
As a stand alone film it is a classic formulaic natural disaster film, but given that we shape out understanding of reality through the consumption of media, the realistic depiction of the devastating horror of wild fires (an issue only getting worse as we head deeper into the climate crisis) is handled quite well.
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Wife of a Spy
Even if it never explicitly mentions Unit 731, that this film addresses the Imperial Japanese Kwangtung Army's biological experiments on prisoners of war--with one particular harrowing scene of (not actual historical) archive footage--is quite subversive as one released in the height of Japanese historical revisionism as state policy. This is the Godzilla-1-era of Japanese Showa Nostalgia era of cinema, after all.
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Network
Capitalism has the power to absorb all criticism of itself. Howard's psychotic outbreaks are commodified up to when they directly endanger capitalism--only then, direct intervention is required, first, at the hands of Jensen and his understanding of capitalist realism (there are no nations, only companies), and then more definitively at the hands of former communists, now themselves entrenched in the market of media entertainment and the attention economy.
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Resurrection
There are plenty of self-congratulatory films about film, but this is truly the one all-time must see.
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It Was Just An Accident
I did enjoy this and given the context of the director think it is a valiant work, but do have some gripes with it.