Aftersun (2023) - Movie Review

We never know people as well as we think we do. No matter how close we get to someone else, or how honest they are to us about what makes them tick, there will always be this invisible wall that will prevent total understanding from taking place. In the moment, it’s possible to overlook this and just take joy out of being with that person, getting to share experiences with them and connect with as much of them as can make it through that wall. But as they drift apart, as people inevitably do for one reason or another, it eventually reaches a point where all that is left is the memory. Those imperfect, incomplete moments that have already been captured. It can be a source of great comfort, or possibly great pain, to reflect on those moments as a means of reconnecting with that person, albeit asymmetrically, but recollection is a funny thing. It’s not always as we remember it.

Hypnotic (2023) - Movie Review

There are few things that fill me with more delight than seeing the words “Directed by Robert Rodriguez” in big fuck-off letters on a cinema screen. I’ve gotten to the point where I would willingly watch the guy work on just about anything, but there’s something special about seeing his work on the big screen. The human lab rat turned one-man film crew who lives and breathes neo-exploitation and old-school pulp cinema, he’s the guy that marked the real turning point for my fascination with filmmaking as a creative process, and auteur theory in particular. And with his latest, a detective-led crime drama that spirals out into a government conspiracy involving psychics and the power of hypnotic suggestion, there’s quite a bit of other auteurs to be found in the construction here.

Oxygen (2021) - Movie Review

A woman wakes up in a cryogenic pod. She has no memory of how she got there, or even who she is. She has no contact with the outside world, save through the pod’s built-in A.I. MILO. The oxygen levels in the sealed pod are down to a third, and there is no way for her to get out. And… action!

Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020) - Movie Review

We need to laugh in the face of death. It’s something we all have waiting for us wherever the road happens to stop, and it’s the kind of terrible but inevitable event that humour was designed for. Comedy is many things to many different people, but for me, it’s how we deal with the worst that life has to offer, up to and including its end. It’s a way of coming to terms with what we must come to terms with, and learning to take things on the chin so we can carry on with however much of our lives we have left. It’s the kind of morbid cheek that I have spent most of my own life embracing in one form or another, and it’s why this documentary really stuck a chord with me.

The Truth (2020) - Movie Review

Fabienne Dangeville (Catherine Deneuve) is the worst kind of prima donna. Endlessly vain and egotistical, she makes for one of the rare cinematic instances of the separation of art and artist from the perspective of the artist. She has a strained relationship with her daughter, writer Lumir (Juliette Binoche), but rather than being at all concerned with that strain, she just focuses even more on her acting craft. So long as the audience forgives her transgressions, that’s all that matters.