The titular the utopian metropolis that’s at the center of this movie is less a vision of the future than a peek into the past — the space age that only a mid-century society, drunk on wonder and new advances in transportation, could have envisioned. The anachronism is very much by design: Positing that the only way to move forward may be to go back, Tomorrowland aches for an era when people were still hopeful about where the world might…
This in many ways feels like the endpoint of our long recent journey of eat-the-rich cinema, which has volleyed us from from Succession to Triangle of Sadness to The White Lotus to The Menu. All of those movies and series are in some way comedies that assure us the elite are miserable, whether they get what’s coming to them or not; they also allow us to enjoy secondhand experiences of the luxuries they bask in and the terribleness with which…
Focused on an entirely hollow, woefully one-sided friendship, Mr. Church is Bruce Beresford somehow trying his hand at another Noble-Black-Man-With-No-Autonomy-Of-His-Own movie with, once again, terrible results. It’s all told in abysmally hyperbolic narration, all from an atrocious and cowardly script that stays so maddeningly vague with its titular character that it ultimately makes this small, gooey movie borderline incompetent.
A great example of a film that’s constantly teaching you how to watch it. From its first shot on, Andrea Pallaoro invests his film in quiet, very still moments, inviting the viewer to study the details of behavior; with almost every unspoken gesture and movement emphasized to the point that they become akin to pieces of a puzzle that the viewer must sort out to form a portrait of its titular character. It’s such an intricate approach that it avoids…
