AGGRO DR1FT
SimilarBangkok Dangerous (2008), Conspiracy Theory (1997), From Russia with Love (1963), Hitman (2007), Léon: The Professional (1994), Lucky Number Slevin (2006), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), You Only Live Twice (1967),
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 →
The Pale Blue Eye
Watch afterThe Menu (2022),
Scott Cooper’s sense of place and his sense of dread go hand in hand. He was born in Abingdon, Virginia, a city with a population under 10,000, and the place’s melancholy struck him like lightning. Every one of his films is concerned with the impossibility of calling somewhere home, and he shows that even places meant to hold promise are forbidding and corrupt. From the dying factory town of Out of the Furnace to the blood-soaked frontier in Hostiles to the addiction-ravaged backwoods of Antlers, nothing can make Cooper’s America feel anything but haunted. And that's the case in his latest, The Pale Blue Eye. Continue Reading →
Babylon
SimilarLucky Number Slevin (2006), Maria Full of Grace (2004), My Own Private Idaho (1991),
Watch afterAnt-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), The Whale (2022),
Babylon is a frenetic crash course in Hollywood history that plays fast and loose with most of its facts. However, it still paints a vivid portrait of Tinseltown from its birth to the behemoth it is today. You won’t find the meticulous and mind-boggling commitment to detail of Mank (most of Margot Robbie’s costuming looks more 2010s than 1920s). Still, director and screenwriter Damien Chazelle is less interested in getting everything right than translating that history into something an audience can feel in their bones. Continue Reading →
The Fabelmans
A little over 24 hours after seeing it, there are two sequences in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans that I've run on repeat back and forth. One dramatic, the other comedic—both illustrate the strengths of Spielberg's semi-autobiography. Continue Reading →
헤어질 결심
Park Chan-wook fans can rest assured that the director who gave us the twisty, blood-soaked passions of Oldboy, Stoker, and The Handmaiden has returned with another romantic crime-fueled drama. His latest, Decision to Leave, is high-grade neo-noir, the newest installment in Park’s ongoing exploration of the genre. Continue Reading →
I Love My Dad
For writer/director/star James Morosini, I Love My Dad acts as therapy. The self-reflexive comedy-drama finds Morosini telling a story of a father catfishing his son to get back into his good graces, a true-ish story from his own life. Morosini is joined by Patton Oswalt, playing his pseudo-dad named Chuck, in one of the veteran comedian’s meatier roles of the last decade. Oswalt has the unenviable job of being distant yet hoping to remain close, of playing the roles of Franklin’s (Morosini) online girlfriend and absent father. He performs it with gentle, manic, absurd brilliance. Continue Reading →
Everything Everywhere All at Once
SimilarBatman Begins (2005), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), Zatoichi (2003),
Watch afterThe Menu (2022), The Whale (2022),
StarringKe Huy Quan,
Everything Everywhere All at Once is glorious. Continue Reading →
Nitram
SimilarAnna and the King (1999), Brubaker (1980), Freedom Writers (2007),
Mississippi Burning (1988) The Pursuit of Happyness (2006),
Justin Kurzel’s Nitram rarely features violence. Instead, it’s often subdued in anger, existing in long stretches of loneliness and isolation. The tone follows its lead, played by a phenomenal Caleb Landry Jones. He wanders through a small Australian town without friends or steady way to spend his time outside of fireworks. He exists in a muted state of prolonged sadness, taking enough medication to dampen his emotions. He's unable to make any lasting relationships. Kurzel’s film, based on the 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, simmers towards an inevitable conclusion, constructing and examining the events leading to a tragedy, frightening in its intimacy. Continue Reading →
Calmos
A look at some of our favorite movie & TV characters who used body & brains to get what they want -- even if it killed someone.
Last year for Valentine’s Day we talked about our favorite horror-romance movies. Now we’re writing a love letter to some of pop culture’s greatest femme fatales, those one of a kind women who use their sharp wits and killer bodies to get what they want from dumb-with-lust (or just dumb) men. Sometimes they have a specific end game in mind, sometimes they just do it for fun. Whatever the case, they do it with style, purpose, and while fully in charge of their own sexuality, and those are all admirable qualities. It’s a shame that sometimes people end up dead because of it.
Alice Morgan, Luther
Because every Holmes needs a Moriarty, it felt right that Idris Elba’s detective John Luther would need a corresponding criminal mastermind. Played with a dangerously cool allure by Ruth Wilson, Alice is brilliant and beautiful as the stars she studies, and just as cold and empty. These two are perfectly matched in every way, attracting where they should repel. In one memorable scene, Alice describes a black hole to John in a way that Hannibal Lecter might describe the curve of someone’s thigh: “It consumes matter, sucks it in and crushes it beyond existence. When I first heard that I thought that’s evil at its most pure. Something that drags you in, crushes you, makes you...nothing.” His greatest enemy and closest confidant, Alice is the only person who truly understands John, and vice versa. The lines get so blurred between hunter and hunted they disappear altogether. The fact that John is still standing at the end proves the old adage that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Continue Reading →