Category: Movie Reviews

The Drama: Her Trauma, His Inconvenience

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Working against the Hollywood norm of spoiling the entire film in the trailers, A24 very specifically kept the major reveal a secret throughout the advertising of Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama. This review, however, will not be as respectful of that secrecy, so if you would like to still be surprised when watching the film, my short notes are that the film is well made with special accolades going to Borgli and Joshua Raymond Lee for their editing, but I have issues with the film’s viewpoint on Emma’s (Zendaya) “drama” and it’s focus primarily on how that affects Charlie (Robert Pattinson).

Emma and Charlie are an engaged couple a week from their wedding date. They are busy making the final decisions and preparing their speeches for the reception with the help of their best friends, fellow couple Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie). One evening while giving the reception dinner one last taste test and inebriated on tasting wine, Mike and Rachel share that before their wedding, they told each other the worst thing that they ever did. The four go around the table sharing, but when Emma shares that she nearly committed a school shooting the mood sours and the night ends abruptly.

The rest of the film follows Emma and Charlie (mostly Charlie) as they must deal with the repercussions of this unearthed history. Charlie becomes largely frightened by Emma, now suddenly seeing her capacity for violence. Rachel shuts Emma out calling into question what will happen to their wedding party. At one point, Charlie irrationally scared and emotionally insecure begins talking to coworker Misha (Hailey Gates) about “the drama” and ends up crying before aggressively kissing her and initiating sex. All the tension builds to the climax at the wedding reception where Charlie cracks, unable to hold everything in.

Where The Drama works best is in its technical aspects especially the editing. The film shoots multiple ways different scenes could play out and inserts them all into the film as a way of showing the mindset of the characters. Emma and Charlie’s fears as to what the other is thinking become especially clear because of this technique. Beyond that editing trick, the entire film feels very polished and well put together, though leaves enough of an edge for it to feel real.

While the technical aspects of The Drama are largely unimpeachable, when it comes to Borgli’s writing and direction the issues arise. While the film is being sold as having co-leads between Zendaya and Pattinson, Pattinson is the film’s protagonist and most of the plot revolves around how “the drama” is affecting him. This centering of Charlie frames Emma’s past as a problem for him to deal with, largely removing her trauma from the equation.

When Rachel and Mike tell (not ask) Emma and Charlie that the four of them will share the worst thing that they ever did, Emma instantly looks uncomfortable by the prospect and never agrees to the promise. After Rachel and Mike share, and Charlie’s answer is ignored and told he isn’t participating anymore, Emma feels pressured into divulging her memory. Once she does, outside of a couple instances of nervous vomiting that night and again in the morning, the question of how being forced to relive her trauma affects her is never explored. The film seems to think that the only repercussions she receives come in the form of wedding drama. How reliving this trauma and losing her support system in the process affects her mental health is a question that Borgli has no interest in exploring.

Instead of expanding on the feelings of the woman who is reliving her trauma and seeing her future disappear because of it, the film largely obsesses over how difficult that is for the man about to marry her. Charlie shows no empathy to Emma (despite mentioning twice how important a quality that is to him). Instead, he is frightened of her (in a way that is played for laughs but comes across as heartless) despite her never showing him a violent side of her before. In addition to his fear, he spends much of his time focusing on maintaining his friendship with Rachel and Mike over prioritizing the needs of his fiancé. He is so emotionally affected by learning that about Emma’s past that he cheats on her in the midst of a crying fit. The entire experience of dealing with Emma’s past is centered on Charlie’s feelings, which I found to be rather insulting. The need to explore the impact that a complete emotional upheaval from a woman has on her male partner rather than spend time with her and her feelings is rather chauvinist.

Even when Charlie finally receives the consequences of his behaviors during the wedding reception, Borgli rewards him by having Emma coming back to him, no apologies necessary. I could see an argument that the final scene is another Charlie daydream taking place only in his head but given how much the rest of the film is on his side, it seems like the ending being literal is what Borgli intended.

Another concern that I have with the film is its seemingly villainization of mental health struggles. It never dawns on Charlie, Rachel, or Mike that Emma may have been hurting as a child. They all jump to assuming psychopathy. While bullying and depression are not an excuse for a mass shooting by any measure, the fact is that Emma didn’t go through with it despite coming close, and the reason she didn’t was because someone reached out. Charlie almost understands when at one point he comments on the number of school shootings in America and how many other people must have gotten close, but instead of exploring the mental health epidemic, he (playing a British man in the film) laughs it off as a cultural thing. That was the only time that Emma’s motivation as something other than psychopathy is considered by those three.

Men praising other men for ignoring or disrespecting the feelings of the women in their life and rewarding them for barely making it over the bar sitting on the floor is a long cinematic tradition, but that doesn’t mean it is not disappointing every time. The Drama had a lot of potential and could have been a fascinating character study had it chosen to follow Emma, the character that inciting incident happened to. I do think it could have flourished, though most likely had it been directed by a woman.

1/21/2026 – The Testament of Ann Lee

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn Movie Reviews, New Release Reviews, New Releases, New Releases, Quick Daily Reviews1 Comment

In flipping The Brutalist roles with her husband Bradey Corbet, Mona Fastvold creates a feminine take on America’s poisonous soul that destroys creative or enlightened immigrant when they attempt to place roots here. While Corbet’s turn to direct focused on a fictional architect who felt convincingly real to the extent that many people questioned if he was, Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee depicts a real person who feels too fantastical to believe.

Amanda Seyfried plays the titular religious leader as a wide-eyed, curious, and approachable mother to her congregation. Despite her position atop the Shaker movement and the proclaimed second coming of Jesus Christ she doesn’t seek power, has no interest in controlling her followers for personal gain, and truly only wants to spread her beliefs and visions for the benefit of others. While some may criticize Ann Lee’s perpetual purity as the film lacking character development in its protagonist, in my opinion, that was not Fastvold’s goal. The film is less about the life of Ann Lee and instead about the bliss that she brings her believers as well as the world’s refusal to allow something so pristine and genuine to exist.

The Testament of Ann Lee takes no definitive position on the woman and the Shaker’s position that she was the rebirth of the messiah, though I have seen some critics impose their own assumptions of this crux of the film. While I assume that Fastvold is not personally a Shaker with those beliefs – the film’s credits inform that the Shaker movement is down to only two current believers – but to Fastvold’s purpose Ann Lee is a perfect symbol of the good in humanity for contrasting against the rigid and unaccepting world.

Not only does Ann Lee represent a purity which the patriarchal world she was a part of, that we still are a part of, feels compelled to destroy. It instinctively despises and uproots such a feminine ideal before it can spread or thrive. This femininity is not solely expressed by the gender of the film’s protagonist – though the 18th century Sharkers not only allowing women to preach but lead their church was a level of progressive feminism that it would take literal centuries to return – it is also expressed in the filmmaking. The Brutalist shot in gorgeous 70mm was a feast for the eyes though as the title implies, the views were rather brutal with lots of harsh lighting clearly showing every inch of László Tóth’s architecture. The Testament of Ann Lee was also shot in 70mm, yet it has a completely different feel to it. Instead of the harsh lights that consume the former’s film, Fastvold’s picture is lit with warm candlelight and creates a much more welcoming demeaner.

Though arguably the directorial decision that marks the film as the feminine alter ego of The Brutalist is that it is a musica, though not a traditional one. The film is peppered with the Shaker’s worship sessions, all of which include music and dance. Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography for the film is brilliant as different worships flow from improvisational (at least in appearance) to showy structured moments flawlessly. While the scene scored to “Worship” shows this fluidity the clearest, the “All is Summer” prayer on the boat to America is the standout. Fastvold uses Rowlson-Hall’s choreography with cuts between seasons to create a mesmerizing, singular number.

In addition to Rowlson-Hall’s choreography, these musical and dance moments fully succeed because of the contributions by composer Daniel Blumberg who is fresh off his Oscar win from, as one might guess, The Brutalist. His score uses the bones of actual Shaker hymnals to create the soundscape that floods the majority of the film. He taps into the inherently rhythmic essence of the Shaker’s prayers to propulse the film forward. Each individual aspect of The Testament of Ann Lee builds it into a pure cinematic experience. Blumberg’s score, Rowlson-Hall’s choreography, William Rexer’s cinematography and Fastvold’s direction all blend together into a singular piece worthy of one of the Shaker’s three-day marathon prayer partie

12/23/2025 – The Mastermind

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In search of a contrast from yesterday’s extravagant blockbuster I needed to return to my independent roots with one of my favorite directors working today, Kelly Reichardt, for her new film The Mastermind.

Reichardt, known for her deliberate pace making her one of the current flag bearers for slow cinema, once again takes her turn in a genre of cinema that seems antithetical to her style. The Mastermind does for heist films what Night Moves did for ecoterrorist pictures, and Meek’s Cutoff did to the neo-western. In all three of the films, she deconstructs the genre removing it of all the glitz that normally attracts an audience and instead focuses on the characters and the impact that the inciting incident of the film has on their psyche.

James Mooney (played magnificently by Josh O’Connor) is a failed architect who feels emasculated by his parents Bill (Bill Camp) and Sarah (Hope Davis) who degrade him for being without work, and his wife Terri (Alana Haim whom I wish we saw more of), who provides for him and their two children. As an avid art connoisseur, James plans to steal four paintings from the museum with the help of a few friends. While the heist is initially successful, it is quickly pegged to James, and he is forced to leave his family and go on the run. While this seems like it would be a tense setup for a thriller, Reichardt does not focus on the active tension, but instead sits with Mooney as he comes to terms with his new reality.

Alana Haim as Terri frustratingly taking a call from James while at work

O’Connor plays the part of James as a lost soul who feels entitled to a life without working for it. He feels no drive to return to architecture but instead poorly plans a heist that is only initially successful because of security guards caught in a complete malaise and one of the people he hired to help with the heist brandishing a gun despite James asking him not to bring one. His entitlement around the theft is shown both by his borrowing money to pay his accomplices for the heist from his mother, and by his reaction upon having the stolen paintings in his possession. While his intension is to sell the paintings, he initially hangs them on his wall as if they should be his rather than in a museum full of people he thinks won’t respect them. Once he is forced onto the road this entitlement persists as he endangers his friends by staying with them, and then by first asking his wife to send money and finally resorting to stealing to fund his continued escape.

Josh O’Connor as James Mooney lost on the run

Reichardt enhances this feeling of masculine entitlement through the supporting characters James meets on the run. Other men give him the benefit of the doubt and want to support him while women resent his delusion and begrudge him for thinking they should help him. Additionally, the background of the setting (1970 America) calls out James’s privileged stance by including news footage of the time focusing on the terror that was the Vietnam War, and eventually this movement for peace and equality literally engulfs him to diminish his self-aggrandizing beliefs.

Reichardt has always been interested in gender dynamics, and she holds no punches in her takedown of masculine entitlement in The Mastermind. While the film is rather vicious in its subtext, it still manages to maintain that essential Reichardt calmness. She is not looking to spoon feed plot nor themes to the viewer, but instead she trusts that by using a well-known genre as a backdrop and filling it with contemplative moments an attuned audience is able to process the message behind the silence.

12/22/2025 – Avatar: Fire and Ash

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Sorry that I disappeared for a couple of weeks. Life is never easy around the holidays. There was no way that I wouldn’t be back to talking about the only blockbuster of the year to which I was looking forward.

The thirteen-year gap between the first and second Avatar films represents me at very different points in my cinematic journey. In 2009, I was a college student who had recently been introduced to my first Kurasawa and Bergman films. Having my first taste of arthouse cinema, I was predisposed to be exceptionally snooty about Avatar. I saw it in theaters once and dismissed it for being a shallow story that had been told dozens of times previously. In 2022 when the Way of Water came out, my tastes had evolved. While I still tend to prefer an arthouse film over a blockbuster, I can appreciate a film that puts its craft before the screenplay as a piece of visual art. This led me to seeing Way of Water in the theaters three times because while James Cameron had not improved his screenwriting ability in the decade, seeing the visuals on the biggest screen and in 3D was a necessity for me.

Now three years later, I went into Fire and Ash excited to see what visuals Cameron would create to elate my eyes. While the Sully story is still not the strength of the films, I was also interested in some of the themes that Cameron was exploring and hoped that he would expound upon them.

With his third entry in the Avatar series, Cameron has distilled his skills to their purest form, and that is both a compliment and a criticism. To start with the negative, the screenplay to Fire and Ash is easily the worst of the three. Despite the three-hour plus run time, it still feels like the plot is rushing constantly, and many of the plot points that it is rushing to are rather groan worthy. It rehashes the exact same story between Jake (Sam Worthington) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) as in the Way of Water, and every character seems to be rehashing things from that film to some extent.

On the other hand, Fire and Ash is one of the most gorgeous pieces of celluloid I have ever had the privilege to see. Having never fallen for the gimmick of 3D outside of a few exceptions, the Avatar films are the only two movies I’ve seen this decade in the 3rd dimension and would highly recommend it to anyone. While just as full of CGI as the average superhero film, Cameron manages to bring depth to his images by shooting them in a more naturalist framing and lighting than the other blockbuster which use a heavy reliance on wide shots with flat lighting to make the CGI easier. Cameron has always been dedicate to his craft and the crystal clear picture with the depth of 3D in the various Pandoran biomes has never been more spectacular.

The last thing to touch on is a theme that Cameron has been developing I the three films so far. Cameron has been interested in exploring the theme that diverse groups are stronger together than apart. Specifically, that the Navi and Humans when working together can overcome either individually. In depicting this theme, however, Cameron has flirted with and occasionally crossed the line into a traditional white savior narrative. This was especially problematic in the first and while it never fully escaped that narrative in the second, the third does lean back into the problematic side.

James Cameron continues to be appointment watching, and while this does feel like the weakest of the three Avatar films, I still cannot help but endorse seeing it on the big screen. Blockbusters made from a place of passion and desire to create art simply don’t exist anymore outside of his hands. While I can quibble with this film’s story and themes, it is still the most visually spectacular thing that I’ve seen in theaters at least since The Way of Water. Cameron has made a lifelong fan in me and I hope that we do get the 4th and 5th entries into this series.

12/03/2025 – Irma Vep (1996)

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I am still an Assayas neophyte having seen his two Kristen Stewart pictures and nothing else, but during last month’s Criterion Collection sale, I blind purchased Irma Vep on his name alone. This film deals with a lot of French cinematic history that despite my love for their films, I am still not the best suited to do, but I will give it my best chance.

Starring Maggie Cheung as a fictionalized version of herself, Irma Vep is loosely the story of a French director René (Jean-Pierre Léaud) choosing to remake the 1915 ten-episode serial Les Vampires with Cheung playing the lead Irma Vep, an anagram for vampire. The film follows Cheung a non-French speaking actress from Hong Kong, on set for a few days of shooting where nothing goes as one would expect. Supported by costume designer Zoé (Nathalie Richard) who develops an instant crush on Cheung, she is thrown from moment to moment with little control over the circumstances.

The original Irma Vep (Musidora) from 1915’s Les Vampires

The plot synopsis is rather brief for this film, because there is A. very little of it, and B. what plot there is has next to no importance to the themes with which Assayas is wrestling. Irma Vep is an exploration of the history of French cinema, as well as its place in the wider film world in the mid-90s. As I warned up front, I am not a scholar in this department, so while some of my assumptions may be off base from what Assayas was attempting to get at, I am going to share my reading of the film.

Simply by being about remaking one of the cornerstones of French film history, especially a few decades before all movies became nostalgic look backs, Irma Vep declares that it wants to have a conversation with the countries past with the medium. Of specific note, after her first day on set, Cheung goes home with Zoé for an after-work party that she is hosting and runs across a pair of filmmakers discussing a film of theirs that Zoé calls “new” when they insist that the film is 20 to 25 years old. This is a clear allusion to the French New Wave and that what was revolutionary at the time no longer feels like where the country was cinematically. There is mention that the two directors do not make political films anymore which further emphasizes this move away from the New Wave and its aggressively progressive politics. While personally I don’t know that I buy this argument as films like La Haine had come out just a year prior, it is undeniably true that the New Wave had ended.

Maggie Cheung as a fictional Maggie Cheung as Irma Vep

Cheung represents France importing other cultures filmmaking into theirs. I think when also considering that in the miniseries remake Cheung’s character is instead American both represent a piece of the culture that France was being influenced by. From America, the hyperviolent indie boom (think Quentin Tarantino), and from Asia, Cheung herself was famous at the time from the Police Story and The Heroic Trio films (the latter of which is even played by René implying that is why he sought her out) represent France’s movement from Auteurism to more Vulgar Auteurism. Assayas also seems to worry that France’s film industry may be left behind as once a new director takes René’s place and does not believe a Hong Kong actress should play one of Frances most classic roles, Cheung flies not home, but to New York and Los Angeles to meet with Ridley Scott (who the real Cheung never worked for) and then her agent. This seems to be Assayas believing that America is the new home for the transgressive cinema that France had a near monopoly on for decades.

Filled with likely hundreds of references that I did not pick up, Irma Vep is an extremely deep text for being less than 100 minutes. While I would never recommend the film for someone looking to turn their brain off for a movie, if you are interested in engaging with the history that Assayas is grappling with, then Irma Vep is a French cinema 101, 201, and 301 rolled up into one unique package.

12/02/2025 – Bone Lake

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The last few days have involved some rather high brow cinema, so today seemed like a good chance to prove that I don’t only watch 5 ½ hour Russian documentaries and heart throbbing dramas from auteurs. Today I reached into my 2025 back log and pulled out an aggressively sexual, sleezy horror film Bone Lake.

Starring Maddie Hasson (who despite what I originally thought is not Florence Pugh’s alias) and Marco Pigossi as Sage and Diego a couple whose relationship is on the precipice of change as Diego leaves his job teaching to work on a novel full time. They escape to a remote mansion on the titular Bone Lake only to have their weekend interrupted when it Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita) show up as well having apparently rented the same place.

Marco Pigossi and Maddie Hasson as Diego and Sage

Mercedes Bryce Morgan directs the film by bringing a decent amount of style from the directorial chair for the journeywoman director. Her experience with directing music videos shows as much of the style is reminiscent of that medium. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of her direction, however, is that she kept her vision untouched resulting in a film that is slightly gorier and substantially sexier than most films in this genre made today.

A significant amount of digital ink has been spilled in the last handful of years on gen Z’s disinterest in sex in movies. While I understand and respect the desire for more platonic stories in film, there is something to be said about enjoying some gratuitously horny cinema. Sex is a part of humanity worth capturing, and a titillating one at that. Bryce Morgan does not shy away from this piece of humanity and understands its inherent entertainment value.

Sage reaching for the showerhead in the bathtub

While Bone Lake won’t be brought up in the coming months as the awards conversation takes over Hollywood, it still fills a niche that has been increasingly shrinking in the current cinematic landscape. Bryce Morgan created a film that was first and foremost fun entertainment without resorting to endless flatly lit wide shots on a green screen. When so much of what makes it to theaters is $300 million blockbusters shot so safely that they risk nothing and $5 million arthouse gems (which don’t get me wrong I love), Bone Lake proves that pure entertainment does not have to be so safe it might as well be hermetically sealed.

12/01/2025 – My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow

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When films cross the two-and-a-half-hour mark, that tends to be the point at which terms like bloat and poorly edited come into play. However, there exists a second line somewhere around the four-hour mark where the running time becomes a feature of the film rather than a bug. When one is locked in a room with the same few people for such an extended period (and it is essential that films this long be watched in one day with no more than a few intermissions), they become less characters on the screen and more personal acquaintances or even friends.

Julia Loktev’s five-and-a-half-hour epic of a documentary My Undesireable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow is one such example of a film using its marathon length as an important part of the filmmaking. Through five chapters, the film makes a record of the last five months of TV Rain, the last independent, oppositional news organization in Russia, before they were forcefully closed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While a 90-minute documentary on this subject would be informative and if done well impactful, Loktev’s decision to be as expansive as she was brought a power with it by getting to know a wide array of characters intimately.

TV Rain employee “foreign agent” Anna Nemzer

Loktev is a Soviet-born American filmmaker who in October 2021 traveled to Moscow to create a documentary about Russia’s recent branding of oppositional journalists as “foreign agents” including her friend Anna Nemzer. Anna introduces Loktev to the contributors to TV Rain for which she has a show. The handful of journalists who originally were branded with the foreign agent label wear it with a combination of pride and fear and many use the required language they are required to include on every post for ironic purposes.

One of the genius decisions of the film is the chapter flow. Each individual chapter is presented in a cinéma vérité or slice of life manner. Most of the filming takes place in cars, the TV Rain studio, or people’s apartments, and each hour-long section seems most interested in giving the viewer a peek into the life of an oppositional journalist at that exact moment in time. When zooming out, however, the film takes a concrete shape. The initial two chapters provide a background for the people and the circumstances which they inhabit. The third chapter is a bit of a break from the intensity. Things are obviously still tenuous in each journalist’s life, however even as the walls close in they are able to enjoy the New Years holiday together. That moment is a welcome reprieve before the final two chapters leading until the very moment that the TV Rain employees are forced to vacate the soon to be under siege studio and exile themselves from the country.

Ksenia Mironova

My Undesirable Friends is an engrossing cinematic experience starring journalists whom having spent so much time with I feel intimately connected to. The film teaches about the horrible human rights violations Putin is behind while keeping things personal. I cannot wait to dedicate another five plus hours to the topic when part II is released.

11/30/2025 – The Fall

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While technically a re-watch for me, it has been 15 years since I last saw Tarsem’s The Fall, and this was my first chance to see the eye blindingly gorgeous film in 4K. Shot on location in 28 countries over the course of 4 years with next to no computer effects, The Fall is the quintessential cinematic passion project where quality trumps everything else.

Staring the young Romanian 6-year-old actress Catinca Untaru in her only feature role as Alexandria a patient in a hospital with a broken arm, and Lee Pace as Roy, a bedridden stuntman who she befriends, The Fall is a touching story of collaborative storytelling and the power that it holds over those who tell and listen to it. When Roy inadvertently receives a message that Alexandria threw out a window to Nurse Evelyn (Justine Waddell) she becomes quickly enamored with him and he feels as though through telling her a story, he might be able to use Alexandria to steal morphine for him. Through this initially transactional relationship, Alexandria eventually penetrates Roy’s depressive, nihilist mood as together they shape his fantastical story.

Tarsem employs a filming technique with Untaru that can easily backfire but works excellently in the film. Most of Untaru’s lines were unscripted, instead she was put in the scene with Pace and her natural reactions were what was used. Pace was even kept in the faux hospital bed for entire shooting days so that Untaru would believe that he was actually unable to walk. This leads to an unprecedented naturality in the young girl’s performance, and the occasional trailing off and losing of the thread is an acceptable tradeoff for the genuineness of the performance.

While the story and acting in The Fall are both very good, it would be disingenuous to call either the highlight of the film. Colin Watkinson’s photography, Robert Duffy’s editing, and Eddy Pearce’s location scouting are unmatched and should be studied for the rest of cinematic history. Tarsem used no sets or stages in the creation of the film, every single shot needed to be shot on location, including a South African mental hospital as the early 20th century Los Angeles hospital that most directors would be fine staging. Rather than resulting to any trickery, Tarsem would go to lengths of providing locals of the blue city Jodhpur with fresh paint so that the shots would pop rather than perform post shoot color collection. In reference to the editing, The Fall has the single most impressive fade that ever captured on film as seen below.

In the nearly 20 years since The Fall was released Tarsem’s nightmare for the state of movies has largely come true. Most movies these days tend to be shot entirely on green screens with each frame being shot wide and lit flatly so that computers can easily fill in all the empty space. Because of this, Tarsem’s visual masterpiece has grown in importance throughout the years, and the film which had notoriously been impossible to see previously now has an immaculate release as home viewing technology has evolved enough to truly appreciate The Fall’s beauty.

11/29/2025 – Hamnet

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Holy Shit Jessie Buckley!

I honestly thought about making that my entire review for Chloé Zhao’s return from the Marvel verse with Hamnet; her performance was just that good. Stoping after that would both somehow undersell Buckley’s acting masterclass and be disrespectful to the rest of the cast and crew that makes Hamnet a uniquely special film so I shall continue.

Hamnet is a fictionalized telling of the love and grief of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Buckley) who is often known as Anne in history but in some records and this film as Agnes. Maggie O’Farrell adopted her novel of the same name with Zhao which tells the story of Agnes and William’s three children and creates a story for the circumstances that preceded the creation of Hamlet, filling in the gaps in history. While William is obviously the most famous character in the story, the film is primarily Agnes and her children’s story as long sections of the film take place while Shakespeare is in London leaving Agnes to take care of their first child Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and later their twins Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe).

Zhao’s unique directorial vision is used to create a poetic feeling to the film. She makes liberal use of unannounced time jumps, both large ones between scenes and short ones contained within a scene. While these jumps can be slightly disorienting to begin with, they are employed to bring the most important moments and shots to the screen. It is not necessary to see William walk to Agnes and lie down with her, cutting directly from a conversation to them lying together results in amplifying the direct cause and effect. She also uses repetitious shots of nature which call back to the rumors of Agnes being born of a forest witch and create a mesmerizing pace that keeps the audience entranced.

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal as Agnes and William

As not so subtly hinted at above, Jessie Buckley not only gives a career best performance, but the decade’s best performance as Agnes. She mixes bombastic yet true to life moments of pain and suffering, with subtle emotions captured in nothing more than a twitch from an otherwise still face in silence. Agnes is so much more than just the little known wife of the world’s greatest playwright. Under Zhao’s direction and Buckley’s embodying of the woman, William fades to the background (despite another excellent turnout from Mescal) and the story of this woman, her love, and her grief matter more in this moment than the dozens of eternal plays and sonnets.

Agnes (Jessie Buckley) at the Globe Theater

Behind an unmatched acting feat by Jessie Buckley, an engrossing story and adaptation by Maggie O’Farrell, and the directorial elegance of Chloé Zhao, Hamnet is an example of the power that cinema can impart. Equal parts engrossing and devastating the film is an emotional experience to behold that will leave an audience changed. My only advice, outside seeing the film as soon as physically possible, is to double, no triple the amount of tissues you think you need to bring along.

11/28/2025 – Bugonia

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The newest film by Greek auteur/ provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos with his muse Emma Stone. Bugnoia, is a remake of the film I reviewed yesterday, Save the Green Planet! the 2003 Korean science fiction film by Jang Joon-hwan. Along with Jesse Plemons, who joined the director’s stable of actors with last year’s Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos takes the at times farcical Korean genre blur and engulfs it in his signature pitch black satire.

Bugonia follows its predecessor’s basic plotline closely with cousins Teddy (Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) who are convinced of an alien conspiracy and that Michelle (Stone), a CEO of great import, is one of said aliens. One afternoon after chemically castrating themselves to avoid distraction, Teddy and Don camp out at Michelle’s home and kidnap her. While interrogating and torturing her, Teddy’s mixed motives come to the surface.

Emma Stone as Michelle after being kidnaped and having her hair shaved

12 years further into our world’s post-capitalism decline, the themes that Jang Joon-hwan brought to the science fiction story are much more apparent in day-to-day life, and Lanthimos brings them to the forefront. Whether she be an alien or just a corporate monster, Michelle and the corporation she runs are destroying the planet. Teddy, like many activists speaking against kleptocracy today, is demonized and ostracized by the ruling class who control public outlook.

All three of the lead actors gave excellent performances. Stone captures the controlled mannerisms of an executive who has undergone extensive training to come across as considered and polite. She uses phrase like “can we have a dialogue?”  in meticulously paced patterns that reflect corporate speak but come across as alien to the blue-collar cousins who have captured her. Plemons, as the lead conspiracy theorist, is initially convincing in his resolve, but as Michelle puts the pieces of his past together, he becomes violent and emotional.

The standout of the film, however, is Aidan Delbis in his first feature film. He begins the film by playing Don as a simple character who is easily manipulated by Teddy. Delbis shows that Don is unable to completely dehumanize Michelle like Teddy and struggles with the torturous conditions that Teddy is doing to Michelle. After a major turning point in the film, it becomes apparent that Don is not simple, rather he is stunted from emotional loss in his past. This revelation unlocks the layered nuance Delbis had been seeding in his performance from the start, and brings out the lone moment of true sympathy from the viewer.

Aidan Delbis as Don in his first film role

While Bugonia does not reach the highs of some of Lanithmos’ prior films, a middling picture from the auteur is still an excellent release worth viewing. And while most of the acting accolades will end up going to the two star actors, I hope that this film becomes a jumping off point for Delbis’ career.