Poitras questions him on the less glorious moments of his career, too, so that he emerges as a flawed human rather than a bastion of perfect judgement. This is not a perfect documentary either, with the breathless dash through his post My Lai journalism sometimes feeling overwhelming. Yet perfection is not the point when something impossible has been bottled: it’s something called the truth.
In an entertainment landscape saturated with whodunnits, it’s impressive to see Johnson maintain his topical observations and satirical jabs while confidently recalibrating to provide a mystery that shows the genre still has something meaningful to say.
As an awards-bait biopic, Christy is basically solid; as another chapter in the star text of a soon-to-be-28-year-old woman basically no one on the internet can ever be normal about, it’s interesting – and also, given the entrepreneurial Sweeney’s social-media savvy, quite a canny bit of positioning.
While there’s a sense that the thesis here lacks originality, there are enough audiovisual flights of fancy to keep the cheeky intellectual jiggery-pokery ticking along nicely.
There are points here where it feels as if Linklater was trying to make a gender-switched version of Fassbinder’s tragic The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, but without really leaning into the forceful bitterness and agency of the protagonist, and opting to have the text make a more profound point about the precarious nature of power and influence.
In what is essentially a long, barrelling chase movie, the action is relentless, and has little respect for the limits of physiological suffering let alone physical laws.
Though not beyond salvaging as The Carpenter’s Son offers some moments of biblical horror, including an Hieronymus Bosch-like depiction of hell, it doesn’t succeed in pushing past mild discomfort. There is still not enough to drag it down into truly blasphemous depths.
The Ice Tower is as fragile and delicate as a snowflake, as disorientating and mysterious as adolescence, and as dark as a winter’s night. For it is a shadowy frío-noir, complete with femme fatale, even as its elusive, edgy narrative is passed down, like keepsake beads or diffracting crystals, from generation to generation.
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.
