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 […]
Some films sit with you the way a conversation does after you've already said goodbye and closed the door. You replay a phrase, a pause, the thing that was almost said. Magnus von Horn's The Girl with the Needle left me like that, standing in my kitchen at midnight, holding a glass of water I'd
Have you ever been so exhausted you begin foregetting common words? Not dramatic amnesia, just the soft erosion of vocabulary that comes from asking the same questions hundreds of times a day. Did you eat? Do you need to go? What do you want? I watched my sister lose the word for "colander" once, standing
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
People discuss Conclave as if it were a reality show that clergy members participate in while wearing their religious robes. Honestly? I kept waiting for the mess. The reds here work overtime. Berger shoots these cardinals against Vatican marble and every single robe becomes this visual exclamation point, scarlet bleeding into beige stone, then suddenly
Baker shoots Brighton Beach in these nauseating yellows and greens, like the whole neighborhood is lit by convenience store fluorescents. Perfect choice. The color scheme changes to Vegas gold when Vanya and Ani get married in a quick ceremony before returning to the sickly green tone that reality brings with Russian security personnel. The fur
There's this bathroom. The thing about The Substance is that you'll end up thinking about the bathroom whether you want to or not, this sterile white cube where Demi Moore becomes something else entirely, where the green of that injection liquid has more character development than half the script. Look, I get what Coralie Fargeat
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
