This is an honest to goodness nunsploitation film that stars probably one of the hottest Hollywood sex symbols of the day. That sounds, well, exploitative but it seems that Sydney Sweeney was the one who pushed for it to be made and it is relatively restrained in terms of sexual titillation. With its title and setup, it’s not hard to guess that this is about immaculate conception. It’s a rather straightforward take on the premise and I’d say it’s effective enough as horror. It’s also not good enough to really stand out but I’ll take what I can get.
Yasujirō Ozu’s films keep being great and so I keep watching them. This one is actually a remake of his own earlier black-and-white silent film and I’m sure that the improved production values make a difference. It features bigger names as stars as well so it’s the preferred version over the original. As usual with Ozu, this is a film about family and human relationships, but it’s noticeably more salacious and lurid than most of his body of work. It’s centered around a travelling theatre troupe which seems glamorous at first but they all turn out to be a bunch of scoundrels, truly the floating weeds of the film’s title.
A British miniseries about adolescent male violence that is realistic enough to be shown in schools is a must-watch for us. What’s more, each of the four episodes were shot in a single take, lending it both a powerful sense of urgency and some added authenticity. Unlike other crime shows, there is no question of the perpetrator’s guilt and even details of how the murder itself was carried out aren’t that important. What matters is how the machinery of the state is activated in response to a crime like this and how everyone desperately searches to understand what could have driven a 13-year-old boy to kill.
None of Alex Garland’s films have ever really clicked with me. Critics love him however and I’ve read analyses about his work that raise interesting points that I’ve missed, so I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Yet after watching this, I am left even more disappointed and puzzled. Conceptually, I love this and I’m pretty sure I understood what he was going for. But his execution of the idea is so unserious, so deliberately low brow and over the top that it feels like a waste of a good idea. So I’m still not a fan of his work and I really don’t get what his deal is.
I’m slowly growing to be more of fan of the work of Jean-Pierre Melville. Take this crime thriller for instance which tells the story in a very straightforward way. The story itself is intricate only because of the many characters involved and how they must interact with one another. Events play out so organically and unpredictably that it doesn’t feel much like a movie at all. It’s always a pleasure to watch competence in action but this film makes the point that often pure chance plays its part as well.
Netflix is getting serious into prestige television with lavish productions like this. Since I’d never read the actual novel by Gabriel García Márquez, this might the closest I can get to knowing its story. With its gorgeous visuals and huge cast of characters, it effortlessly drew me into the lives of the Buendia family and the founding of the town of Macondo. Yet the longer the story goes on the more bored I became. The series is like a very literal retelling of the novel but seems unable to impart any deeper meaning to the many dramatic twists and turns, making it feel like a soap opera. There will be a second part to the series but at this point I’m not terribly enthusiastic.
A film about a Jewish-American boy who is rebelliously ungrateful of his own affluent background isn’t something is compelling to me even if it features major talents like Anthony Hopkins and Anne Hathaway. But then I realized that we usually get stories from the opposite side of the divide with the underprivileged kid as the protagonist, so this is indeed a novel trajectory. It seems that this is yet another semi-autobiographical film drawn from its director’s life so it does have the ring of truth but it’s probably still a little underwhelming for me.
