Tag: drama
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A Real Pain (2025)
I just saw A Real Pain and it was good. It’s a Holocaust dramedy about New York cousins played by Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg (also the writer/director) who go on a Jewish heritage tour in Poland to honour their late grandmother. It’s a funny, moving, and refreshingly compact film, reminiscent of Woody Allen for…
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The Coffee Table (2022)
A husband, Jesus (pronounced Hey-Zeus, played by David Pareja), and wife, Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), with their newborn baby, are looking to buy a coffee table. The table is composed of two nude women in faux-gold trim supporting a glass top. Clearly, it belongs in a bachelor pad as opposed to a young couple’s…
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Kinds of Kindness (2024)
I just saw Kinds of Kindness and it was certainly an experience. A trilogy of short stories themed around sex, relationships, abuse, and power, it may be director/co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos’ coldest and most contemptuous film, with a title as playfully un-apt on a surface level as Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998), another film about sad and…
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Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
“There’s nothing wrong with Ellen. It’s just that she loves too much.” Oh, there’s something wrong with Ellen, all right. Possibly the first and probably the best of the “psycho girlfriend” genre in cinema, made famous by Glenn Close’s and Michael Douglas’ sleazy Fatal Attraction (1987) – and Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut Play Misty for Me…
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The Dead Don’t Hurt (2024)
I just saw The Dead Don’t Hurt, a western written, directed, composed by, and starring Viggo Mortensen, and it was the dullest, most poorly constructed piece of loose grouting that I’ve seen in a cinema for… a while. 0/4. I rarely give a film a zero score because my rule normally is that if I…
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Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
I just saw Love Lies Bleeding and it was really good. A lesbian romance crossed with a crime drama and set in the 1980s, it stars Kristen Stewart as a mulleted gym clerk, Lou, whose father, Lou Sr (Ed Harris), is a dangerous criminal in the Nevada desert. One day a young woman called Jackie…
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The Zone of Interest (2023)
The first thing I noticed about The Zone of Interest was its certificate. 12A. The equivalent, I suppose, of PG-13 in America. Most adult-oriented films about the Holocaust (or any genocide) would presumably earn a higher rating given what it needs to depict. Schindler’s List (1993), which I was shown in school, is a 15. …
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American Fiction (2023)
I recently saw American Fiction and it was good. The directorial debut of Cord Jefferson, it stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a literature PhD and novelist whose upper-middle-class Black experience is a hard sell for publishers looking to flog books. With his widowed mother’s medical bills to pay, however, he decides to turn…
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Cat Person (2023)
I just saw Cat Person and it was good. Based on the short story of the same name by Kristen Roupenian, which went viral in 2017 for its exploration of gender dynamics as per modern dating, it’s a cleverly constructed black comedy and psychological thriller about an awkward flirtation that ends up going horribly wrong.…
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Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
I just saw Killers of the Flower Moon and it was really good. I was trepidatious about seeing it because it’s three and a half hours long, but having booked myself a seat with a lot of legroom and popped out for a comfort break midway through, I didn’t feel the length at all. (Sidenote:…
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