Tag: Best of 2019

In Review: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

On By ChrisLeave a comment

Arresting the senses and stimulating the mind, Céline Sciamma has made one of the most breathtaking screen romances of the decade with Portrait of a Lady on Fire. After her powerful previous features, Girlhood and Tomboy, Sciamma pivots slightly into a new direction, one that expands upon her queer humanism into more formal approaches. The depth of feeling is still wondrous, but moreso than ever before, the auteur has crafted something quite intellectually rigorous and intuitive that further elevates her emotional naturalism. Here she makes something intellectual and expressionist, bent on removing the creative divides between person and object in matters of art and of love. By the end she leaves you dizzy, catching your breath in the passionate throws of the film’s formalist embrace.

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In Review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

On By ChrisLeave a comment

“It’s good to talk.” So goes the old adage of Mr. Rogers and the new film that follows his teachings and unique impact on American society, Marielle Heller’s restorative A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. The film uses the simplicity and unassuming depth of those words to examine how learn and hold on to pain, certain that there is nothing more dramatic than two people connecting. The two people on the film’s mind are a journalist named Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) and his subject, the incomparable Fred Rogers, played by Tom Hanks as no other performer could have. It’s largely, achingly, two men talking. Or sometimes, for one of them, struggling to talk.

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In Review: The Irishman

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The Irishman is the kind of self-reflective film to come at what might be the beginning of the end of a master filmmaker’s career, made remarkably alive in its ideas and narrative weight through the context of time and experience. Here comes a re-examination of a genre that defined Martin Scorsese’s career, a crime saga in tune to generational divides and the consequences of committing oneself to dying regimes. Epic in its timeline and intellectual scope, Scorsese has made something funereal and absurdly funny, one that appears in surprising dialogue with his career and place in the modern cinematic landscape. The Irishman is a film of fatal mistakes of the soul and a world that eventually spins forward without you, and even against you.

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In Review: Parasite

On By ChrisLeave a comment

In an era where discussions of class structures and all of the inherent systemic evils are constantly at the forefront of both our conversations and the art that responds, master storytelling Bong Joon-ho may have just given us a definitive text. Parasite, his newest blend of classic genres pushed into a daring new future, is far-reaching and immersive in its ideas, a contained piece of essential cinema. It expresses how we live today and how we feel, all while unfolding with unexpected consequences and reveals that serve its look at wealth inequity.

But aside from its ability to condemn the forces upholding our social strata and how it delights us in doing so, Parasite reveals the wounded soul at the heart of the suffering, and the things that keep us apart from even those closest to us. Parasite is an uproarious and furious heartbreaker, one to let consume you with the might of its full force.

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