Riefenstahl is a crushing exposé, and its most impressive trick is peeling back the layers of a very private woman to show a petulant child who can’t believe people haven’t gotten over the atrocities she willingly helped create.
There’s something damning that comes through watching Separated—the idea that things happened and were allowed to happen because of ambition. To advance in their careers, people were willing to enact laws that would cause unspeakable and irreversible harm.
This is not the film you may have expected, but this is a film you can cherish. Its characters bursting with life, its music playful, its visuals astonishing, its plot inviting, and its heart is open. All you have to do is listen.
This film is monumental. It’s thrilling and emotional, quiet and observant, loud and furious. Corbet’s film is a provocative portrait of the pursuit of the American dream.
What it does present is a powerfully told, tightly wound, and riveting story of an American sports broadcasting team on a single day reporting on a major event in world history. It’s entirely apolitical in scope.
It repeats the same joke over and over (and over again). And just when you think Wolfs might be interested in moving onto fresh new material, it attempts the same punchline again, in its 400th variation.
Kurosawa creates such an eerie atmosphere in the first hour of Cloud that watching it crumble into more generic action territory is challenging, and feels like a miscalculation. It doesn’t help that much of the action in the second half isn’t particularly interesting.
Babygirl is an exhilarating thriller that’s piercingly funny. Its real radicalism comes in its bracingly honest approach to sex, power, and discovering what makes you tick.
