4 Best Movies To Watch After Law Abiding Citizen (2009)
Aggro Dr1ft
Perhaps it’s best to talk about AGGRO DR1FT by specifying something: this isn’t a movie. It sometimes doesn’t even feel like art. Harmony Korine’s latest premiered at the Venice Film Festival to a mixed reception and has gone on to a limited theatrical run, but that doesn’t make it a film. Stretches of it feature AI-generated visuals, the dialogue is barely present enough to be asinine, and there’s no true emotion behind its infrared photography. Some parts of it even look bad—like utter garbage, really. As for its 80-minute runtime? Well, even that has some boring pockets. And yet, despite all this, it works, perhaps because of it rather than against it. Whether about what’s onscreen or not, it makes the audience think. In that way, it’s incredibly stimulating, particularly given the material involved. Korine’s work here follows BO (Jordi Mollà), a depressive Miami assassin whose voiceovers wax on about how much he loves his wife and two kids. “I close my eyes. They give me purpose,” he moans. Put this up against an angel-winged baddie who thrusts his pelvis and grunts, “Dance, bitches,” to women locked in go-go cages, and that’s about as deep as anything gets. One is good. One is bad, and maybe a drug lord or whatever. The former is trying to execute the latter. Again, this isn’t a movie. It’s an approximation of one, and any themes that arise during the experience of seeing it are unrelated to what it follows. Continue Reading →
Eileen
Thomasin McKenzie & Anne Hathaway burn up the screen in William Oldroyd’s unsettling thriller. Eileen will likely be lost in the holiday season shuffle among such spectacles as the upcoming Wonka and awards-friendly fare like Ferrari. On the other hand, it’s unclear under what circumstances Eileen would make a big splash. It’s an odd, occasionally off-putting little film that wouldn’t work as well as it does if not for the scorching chemistry between its two leads. Based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s (also odd and occasionally off-putting) novel of the same name, Eileen stars Thomasin McKenzie as the titular character, a lonely young woman stuck in a miserable rut. Living in the most depressing town in Massachusetts circa 1964, Eileen is forced to take care of her alcoholic, mean-spirited father (a chilling Shea Whigham, still somehow not one of Hollywood’s biggest stars), a former cop who’s taken to waving his gun at their neighbors. Working as a secretary at a juvenile detention center, though she’s in her twenties she comes off as someone much younger, a meek and awkward child merely dressing up as an adult. Eileen also has a child’s taste for doing things like ignoring her hygiene, stuffing herself with candy, and compulsively masturbating, while maintaining a rich fantasy life involving rough sex with a detention center guard, or murdering her father. Her boredom has reached pathological levels. Continue Reading →
Memory
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 →
Killer Joe
Upon the news of the passing of William Friedkin, every headline reporting on the news focused on two films. It’s not surprising that the media spent so much time talking about The French Connection and The Exorcist, two bona fide masterpieces that paved the way for a new era of American filmmaking. What was disappointing was this seeming willingness to reduce a cinematic legend’s legacy to a burst of time in the early 1970s, thus dismissing the five decades that followed as either negligible or outright unworthy of interest. Continue Reading →