It sounds like the set-up to a comedy, and to be sure, writer/director Kristoffer Borgli (himself, the cause of controversy, given his recent admission to dating a teenager when he was a decade older than she), plays a lot of this material for uneasy laughs. The wedding scene itself, at the end, is a sort of culmination of everyone’s bad choices in the most public of spectacles (Charlie makes an absolutely ghastly wedding speech resulting, in part, by him getting his nose broken by an angry guest), with various turns of the screw. 

A brutally candid exploration of lust, obsession, and grief, deliberately blurring the line between romantic drama and psychological horror.

Fennell, whose reputation as a cinematic provocateur comes from a pair of hotly disputed previous films, Promising Young Woman, and Saltburn, seems to be setting up a kind of punishment for our expectations: If we were imagining one of world’s most endearing tragedies about passion being turned into a sexually frank and explicit drama, Fennell suggests strongly we think again. That more or less holds true for the rest of the film. As much as the trailer suggests an unhinged, psycho-sexual bacchanalia, the actual event is far more tame  —  at least, graphically  —  than what we might have imagined. 

A similar scheme is hatched in Paul Feig’s film, although I have to be extremely vague about the details so as not to ruin the carefully plotted set-up. Suffice it to say, there’s a good chance you will utterly loathe the film as I did for almost the entire first two acts before the reward comes your way. 

There are a great number of mysteries in Rian Johnson’s third leg of his Knives Out trilogy, many of which answered save one — at least expressly: Why does the lighting change so dramatically in many of the film’s most directly parochial scenes?

For this film, a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the shots vary between languid and almost thunderously violent, from the lilting trills in Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack, to abrasively coarse auditory punch-outs. At times, it’s like the effect of flipping through random channels on your TV, the sudden change of tone and timbre shocking you with their contrast.  

… the final farewell left me both devastated and comforted.

If the beauty of the classic Western at least partially lies in its dependably simplistic morality  —  a villain doing wrong; and a hero stopping them cold  — the modern “neo-western” as Ari Aster’s satirically topical film has often been classified, becomes almost the literal opposite: A film where morality shifts and scuttles about, before getting bludgeoned, shot, blown up, and, eventually paved over and turned into a high-tech office building. 

F1: The Movie is nearly a lap-by-lap redux of 1990’s Days of Thunder.

Ryan Coogler’s horror/comedy/musical/race drama treatise presents more ideas to chew on in its 137 minute run time than some entire summers worth of Hollywood ‘tentpoles.’ 

The dialogue is witty, snitty, and sharp—the kind of thing Soderbergh can craft in his sleep.

Last Breath’s confining tendrils creep into nearly every scene, pulling you deeper into its suffocating grip.