Memory
SimilarAnnie Hall (1977), Ben-Hur (1959), Cape Fear (1991), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Donnie Brasco (1997), Enough (2002), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), From Russia with Love (1963), GoodFellas (1990), Hitman (2007), King Kong (2005), Léon: The Professional (1994), Lucky Number Slevin (2006), Manhattan (1979), Maria Full of Grace (2004), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Pi (1998), Poseidon (2006),
Shaft (2000) Sliver (1993), Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Taxi Driver (1976), The Apartment (1960), The Departed (2006), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Silent Partner (1978), The Terminal (2004), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), The Usual Suspects (1995), Twelve Monkeys (1995), War of the Worlds (2005), We Own the Night (2007), You Only Live Twice (1967),
Watch afterDoctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), Parasite (2019), Society of the Snow (2023), The Batman (2022), Top Gun: Maverick (2022),
StarringRay Stevenson,
Both the main characters in Michel Franco’s Memory are struggling to deal with the echoes of their past. Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), a recovering alcoholic and single mother to 13-year-old Anna (Brooke Timber), desperately wants to forget the unspoken traumas of her childhood. Saul (Peter Saarsgard), on the other hand, can’t grab a hold of his past. He’s powerless as early-onset dementia slowly but inevitably steals it from him. After their high school reunion, he wordlessly follows her home and spends the night standing outside her building. In turn, she visits him at the house he shares with his brother (Josh Charles) and niece (Elsie Fisher). Then she takes him for a walk and accuses him of participating in a rape that she endured at the age of 12, a crime that he has no memory of committing. Continue Reading →
After Yang
Ambulance
Michael Bay, whose 1990s actioners are—for good and ill—iconic parts of the decade’s cinema, and whose 2000s and 2010s work is reliably fascinating (from the terrific Pain & Gain to the baleful Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) delivers a bombastic chase movie that doubles as a damn good character study. Loving but criminal brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) take an ambulance hostage to escape a heist gone sideways. Along for the ride are a masterful EMT (Eiza González) resigned to personal apathy, and a critically injured cop (Jackson White). Amidst the carefully shaped chaos of burnt rubber and bullets, Bay makes space for Gyllenhaal (frenzied and in denial about how badly everything’s gone) Abdul-Mateen II (trying to keep cool even as that becomes impossible) and González (who must break out of her self-built walls if she is to survive) to bounce off each other in a pile of compelling ways. [JH] Continue Reading →
The Blazing World
SimilarPoseidon (2006), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005),
Carlson Young writes, directs and stars in a baffling horror-fantasy about a young woman who deals with trauma by disappearing into an elaborate alternate universe.
The nature of trauma, and how it impacts the human brain, is something that’s frustrating understudied, largely because it’s different for everyone. Some of us can take the terrible things we’ve experienced head on, moving past them and living a normal life. Some of us struggle to maintain that sense of normalcy, while our trauma lingers in the shadows just behind us. And some are so consumed by it that the entire world becomes a hostile, dangerous place. Carlson Young’s The Blazing World is an elaborate take on the latter, an ambitious spectacle for the eyes that lacks in comprehension.
Based on her short film of the same name, Young writes, directs and stars as Margaret, who as a child witnessed the accidental death of her twin sister. The event leaves her haunted by visions of a mysterious man (Udo Kier) who might be the Devil, if for no other reason than every character Udo Kier plays might be the Devil. Some fifteen or so years later, he’s still hanging around, leering at her and trying to lure Margaret into some sort of portal. Continue Reading →