I was a huge fan of It Follows, like so many. David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 breakout was lean, inventive, and genuinely unsettling. It was the kind of early career work that makes you want to follow a filmmaker for the rest of their career. So when his follow-up, Under the Silver Lake, landed him in “director jail,” it felt like an overreaction.
An enormously cluttered experience… smothering the one lovely throughline with cross-property synergistic junk.
The Best Picture race is already over
Comes out cleanly in the wash, if a little frayed – a fun little trifle powered by a genuinely revelatory Ben Wang.
With the world’s biggest genre fest right around the corner, here’s five films being unveiled that we can’t wait to see
A comedy of manners that never feels hemmed in by the concept
There’s a particular kind of horror that doesn’t require a monster at all — the fear of being seen, known, of getting what you thought you wanted. Great horror has always understood this. Leviticus understands it too, and is at its best when the film trusts that that’s enough. It’s at its worst when it reaches for the trappings of the genre to prove the point.
A failure of execution over intent.
The kind of big-scale adventure in the classic Spielberg mold that you’re always hoping he’ll lay in your lap.
If you had to describe a dog to someone who’d never seen one, and then asked them to draw it, would it look like a dog? If they’d never seen an actual dog, could any approximation of what you’d described – 4 legs, 2 ears, wagging tail – get them close enough? And even if it did: would “close enough” to an actual dog just be all the creepier?
This is an image Kane Parsons’s Backrooms keeps circling back to. Is it possible to transmit your interior self to someone else? And if it is, would the result even be recognizable?
Director David Lowery is not exactly known for broad films that appeal to the masses. So there’s some irony in the fact that Mother Mary is – on paper – Lowery’s most commercial film. It features Anne Hathaway as a pop star, a soundtrack from Charli XCX and FKA Twigs, stunning gowns, and centers on the dissolution of a female friendship. It’s appealing and relatable in concept, but surprisingly, Mother Mary may turn out to be Lowery’s most polarizing film yet.
Borgli dives in where others fear to tread, and the results are as hilarious as they are genuinely unsettling
Best appreciated as a visual feast rather than an emotionally satisfying story
DaCosta brings her own sensibilities to Garland’s vision, and while the results may feel more like a necessary pause than a triumph, the craft remains undeniable.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest masterwork took home Best Film, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, among others. Sinners and Weapons notched big wins as well.
