This Icelandic film is worth a watch, especially if you dig glacially paced, detached weirdness drenched in fog and earth tones.
Part dark fairy tale, part folk horror, and part farm noir, it is a slow-burn meditation on familial bonds.
PS: Sheep are freaky AF; I can totally see why Satan adopted them as his animal familar...
RIYL: The Green Knight; Antichrist
Rating: 3.5/5
The Short Take:
The new Bond film is kind of bland and rather anti-climatic.
It's not that it's bad, but rather a mediocre pastiche of previous Bond films, specifically On Her Majesty's Secret ServiceOn Her Majesty's, extracts from You Only Live Twice (the novel), and Daniel Craig channeling Connery and Moore.
The story is kind of ho-hum, the villain is lackluster, not enough is done with the new 00--who, btw, is badass--and the ending is thick with maudlin melodrama.
The est part of the film is a sequence taking place in Cuba; Ana de Armas for the win!
I feel that the filmmakers tried too hard to appeal to Bond diehards, but ultimately their collective Walther PPK got jammed up.
Rating: 3/5
Screenwriter/director Julia Ducournau’s sophomore effort won The Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Which just goes to prove that not only are the French adept at making fucked-up films, they are also adept at enjoying them.
Titane is a difficult film; difficult to watch, difficult to grasp. On the one hand it’s a gonzo Greek tragedy. On the other, it’s a Shakespearean mistaken identity melodrama soaked in petrol and dizzy off of exhaust fumes.
One thing for certain: it’s never not engaging.
Whereas Ducournau’s 2016 debut, Raw, was a twisted coming-of-age story, here she throws a head-spinning array of ideas into the mix. There’s incestual innuendo, hints of homoeroticism, body-horror-meets-womb-horror, feints of Fregoli, steroidal rage, mechanophilia, serial killings, and imposter syndrome fallout, just to name a few of the myriad and deranged themes the story appropriates and hugs tightly to its chest.
The film comes out the gate with a wash of visceral violence that had me cringing, squirming, and muttering “what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck?!?” more than once. Then it dips into a strange and unnerving familial drama taking place at a firestation. To say any more would ruin the experience of watching it yourself.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the entire thing, but I feel that at its core it’s a rumination on loss, getting old, loving cars, and hating your parents. I think.
RIYL: Irreversible; Dead Ringers; Annette
Rating: 3.5/5
