Evan D.Expectations are always high for a well regarded auteur, but they were especially lofty for Celine Sciamma following her revelatory 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. From Water Lillies to Girlhood, the French director has always had a piercing vision, but Portrait brought her the largest audience and most fervent acclaim of her illustrious career. So how did she choose to follow it up? With Petite Maman, a 72 minute fable about a young girl meeting her mother as a child, of course.
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Evan D.For decades film has told the stories of young people finding their way in the world to dazzling effect. There is something so universally relatable about those late teenage years where you feel like you’ve figured it all out and seeing it with the gift of hindsight you realize that those answers wouldn’t come until much later. The hard truth is that coming of age doesn’t happen all at once and that next phase of life brings with it doubts, big decisions and so much more uncertainty. Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World posits that people don’t stop growing up, even when they’re grown.
Evan D.A tale as old as time, how much can true love transcend? Is it simply an intertwining of attractions or is love something more, something so inherent to our very being that we’ll find our way back to it under even the most dire of circumstances? These are questions posed by Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze in What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, a film that askes much but answers sparingly little.
Evan D.The swinging sixties, it’s a decade we look back on for its neon glow, over the top style and cultural influences. In film, we remember it as a decade in which Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman were at the peak of their powers, when the French New Wave was taking over. Gather together what box office information you can from the time and what got people out to the theaters was still Disney musicals (The Jungle Book), Eastwood’s spaghetti western trilogy and a handful of James Bond Movies.
The past is never just the parts we choose to remember from it. The best stuff survives and the rest gets swept under the rug. Today, in an era of film dominated by big franchise features, Edgar Wright — set aside that brief flirtation with directing Ant Man — is one of the handful of directors bucking the IP trend and taking swings on mid budgets and original ideas. He takes influence from the music, atmosphere and genre storytelling of the past to make something totally new. Evan D.Over a career now spanning 10 films and 15 years, Wes Anderson has built himself out to be the most idiosyncratic auteurs of this era. Directors like Fincher, Villeneuve and Nolan may have their own distinct, recognizable flourishes and style, but each of those men’s work bends to commercial whims in a way that Anderson simply does not seem to care about. Love him or hate him, Wes Anderson has built a filmography in his own image, on his own terms.
Evan D.“Faces from my past return” croons Billie Eilish over the opening credits of No Time to Die in her signature haunting tone. Both lyric and singer feel wholly appropriate for a Bond (Daniel Craig) himself haunted by his past misadventures. Portraits of Judy Dench’s M overlook MI6, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) continues to color the decisions of 007 and even Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) reappears for one final mission. No Time to Die spends so much time unpacking the history of our longest tenured Bond, yet the film’s lasting legacy may be what it portends for the future of the franchise.
Evan D.When it won the Palme d’Or back in 2019, on the way to total awards season domination, Parasite began the process of dismantling popular perception of what an awards film could be. Decidedly genre yet nearly unclassifiable as a whole, Bong Joon-ho’s thrilling masterpiece was a far cry from the period drama or stuffy biopic that often garners attention late in the year. If the 2019 Palme d’Or winner blurred the once rigid lines of how we contextualize film genre, the 2021 winner completely blew them up.
Evan D.**TW Suicide is referenced in Dear Evan Hansen and in this review as well**
Humans are social creatures and will go to great lengths to connect with one another. For some that process is easy and natural, but for others connection is a bit tougher. For others still, like the titular lead of Dear Evan Hansen, true human connection can only be forged by gaslighting the family of a deceased classmate. Evan D.Getting old is a long and often lonely road, one that Clint Eastwood knows well. More than fifty years have passed since the spaghetti westerns that made him a household name and nearly twenty since his last Academy Award. Now 91 years old, far closer to the end of that road than the beginning, Eastwood is still making movies. With Cry Macho, like The Mule before it, the cowboy of old Hollywood is starting to grapple with his journey coming to an end.
Evan D.Anyone who had seen Paul Schrader’s existentially dreadful First Reformed had a pretty good sense that his newest effort would be anything but breezy. Man’s struggle against punishing oppression and his culpability for society’s sins has been the defining feature of Schrader’s long, illustrious career. With The Card Counter, it’s Oscar Isaac’s turn to grapple with the dark corners of his past.
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