Kelly Reichardt uses the same method to steal genre movies as J.B. does when stealing paintings because she works with stealth and determination until the missing elements become apparent. The Mastermind presents itself as a heist movie but it actually functions as an anxiety dream that uses corduroy as its outer layer. Josh O'Connor slouches […]
The brown corduroy jacket catches my eye first. Not Chalamet's performance, not the period Greenwich Village streets, but this one jacket that appears in three scenes and each time it's buttoned differently, worn differently, like it's aging with Bob or maybe Bob's aging into it. Brown corduroy in winter New York. Who makes that choice?
An upside down statues of liberty is memorable. The film by Corbet begins with László Tóth stepping into Ellis Island while he views the inverted Lady through his eyes. The opening visual effect shows potential to be a gimmick but the following three and a half hours maintain their focus on disorienting the audience. The
A silence which settles over a room when someone enters at exactly the wrong moment. Not dramatic silence. The other kind: when you were just beginning to feel like yourself, alone, and now you have to rearrange your face. It is the silence of being caught mid-thought, mid-dance, mid-becoming. Shuchi Talati's Girls Will Be Girls
Yellow. The first thing that catches you about September 5 is how aggressively yellow everything looks. Not warm, not golden. Yellow. The control room where these ABC Sports journalists scramble to cover the Munich hostage crisis feels soaked in nicotine stains and fluorescent haze, which works better than it should. Actually makes you queasy. The
The first thing that strikes you about Pablo Larraín's Maria is how goddamned brown everything is. Not sepia. Brown. The Parisian apartment of Maria Callas experienced an untidy entry of Autumn which resulted in complete disorganization of all spaces. Edward Lachman directs his camera as if he were using tobacco water to create paintings which
Look, Jacques Audiard made a telenovela-opera-cartel-trans-musical shot mostly on Parisian soundstages pretending to be Mexico City. You cannot make this stuff up. The entire project appears to result from someone who became heavily intoxicated at Cannes while writing down random concepts on bar napkins before deciding to bring those ideas to life. Which honestly, knowing
Oswald arrives maybe forty minutes in and suddenly everything clicks wrong. The yellow color continues to stay in my mind. This aggressive mustard shade that follows Edward through his apartment building, seeps into the doctor's office walls, stains the bar where he sits alone. Wyatt Garfield captures everything through slightly unaligned camera positions which force
There's a particular silence that happens when you realize someone close to you has failed you, and they don't even know it yet. You carry it alone for a moment, sometimes longer. Maybe you carry it home. India Donaldson's Good One lives inside that silence, and it does so with a patience that feels almost
While loneliness is a shared experience, it's form can vary wildly between participants. Everyone around you mourns the wrong version of the person you loved. I have felt something adjacent to it, though in far less dramatic circumstances: watching an ex's friends toast to memories I was never invited into. Rúnar Rúnarsson's When the Light
