With no substance and no style to be found, all that is left in Wicked: For Good is two actresses, doing more than just belting their hearts out by giving genuinely compelling performances.
It’s uncomfortable and often disturbing viewing, but Osit’s unsentimental, self-critical and refreshingly thoughtful approach makes Predators one of the most valuable entries into a saturated genre, prioritising ethics over emotion.
Ramsay articulates the inarticulate, here through her saturated blues, yellows, browns and greens, the colours of grief and sickness and rot…but also new life, summer skies, and hope.
Perhaps it’s his fidelity to this team of collaborators that creates such a fluid vision; much like the honey bees that Teddy lovingly tends to in his garden, every artist moves in service of a grand design.
It’s a film that understands there’s nothing to be gained from making oneself an island, but remains stoic and unsentimental in its vision of the past.
The smart, keenly observed and undoubtedly thorny power play of After the Hunt make it an arresting psychodrama, confronting our willingness to swallow our own suffering in the name of self-preservation as well as what we owe to ourselves and each other in an imperfect, cheerfully cutthroat society.
It’s a film that feels gloriously alive, earnest in its depiction of masculinity that is fragile rather than toxic while still grappling with the question of why anyone would choose to make a living in such a barbaric way.
