5 Best Movies To Watch After City of God (2002)
Love Lies Bleeding
The word for Rose Glass (Saint Maud) and Weronika Tofilska's Love Lies Bleeding is "precise." From the individual and combined performances of leads Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian (whose turn as a cunning Imperial agent was a bright spot in the often dreary third season of The Mandalorian) to DP Ben Fordesman's chameleonic camera work and hair department lead Megan Daum's wide-ranging design work, everyone on the project knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to get it done. The result is a bracing, clear-eyed noir thriller, and a fraught, swoon-worthy romance. It's my favorite movie of 2024 so far. It's the late 1980s. The reserved and insightful Lou (Stewart) manages a grimy bodybuilding gym in a sunbleached western suburb. She does not talk to her father, the cruel, cunning crime lord Lou Sr. (Ed Harris). She loves her sister, fraying housewife Beth (Jena Malone), and hates that she will not leave her loathsome slimeball husband JJ (Dave Franco). The closest person Lou has to a romantic partner is the aggressively cheerful Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), and their on-off something or other boils down to, in Bart Simpson's words, "geographical convenience, really." Enter Jackie (O'Brian), a drifting bodybuilder aiming for a Las Vegas contest where victory can leap passion into profession. The sparks are immediate. Jackie (Katy O'Brian) strives for bodybuilding stardom. She's doing the work, but the events of Love Lies Bleeding bend the barrier between her reality and her dream. A24. Jackie's drive lights a fire in Lou, and Lou's methodical care grounds Jackie. Simultaneously, Lou's desire to help Jackie achieve her dream and Jackie's desire to make Lou happy lead them to make bad calls—the sort of bad calls that lead to worse calls that lead to blood. And neither JJ's venality nor Lou Sr.'s mercilessness should be discounted. Continue Reading →
The Holdovers
After stumbling with Downsizing, Alexander Payne bounces back with a gentle & witty comedy-drama. The artist Dmitry Samarov one said to me that the ratio of good to bad late periods in an artist's life was depressing to consider. For every Sir Edward William Elgar there was an Eric Clapton (my example, not his), and that it was rare to see someone sharpen as they aged. Now, I like Dmitry and certainly respect his opinion, but I can’t help but feel that when film overtook painting as the dominant artwork that people engage with, the ratio shifted towards bizarre experimentation and welcome self-reflection as much as dull self reflection. Take for instance 62 year old Alexander Payne, who, after the biggest disaster of his career (2017’s confused parable Downsizing), has started his fourth decade as a director by leaning hard back into what he knew (and what the royal “we” enjoyed) and rediscovered himself with The Holdovers, a movie no one can seem to stop comparing to Hal Ashby. No mean feat, of course, but even that sells its virtues short. This is no mere homage, no mere return to form, this is the movie that Payne’s been hoping to make since his 90s heyday, a film that earns both its jaundiced gaze and its catharsis. Continue Reading →
Saltburn
With her first film, Promising Young Woman, writer-director Emerald Fennell took a storyline that was essentially a cloddish-but-glossy retread of such female-driven revenge sagas as Ms .45 and I Spit on Your Grave, infused it with insights regarding gender issues that would barely have passed muster in a 100-level college class and somehow rode it to inexplicable praise and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Continue Reading →
Fair Play
Fair Play is all about the rules of engagement—in business, in bed, in relationships—and the chaos that ensues when someone who lives and dies by those rules suspects his partner is breaking them. However, it isn’t the fairness of the righteous or the just she’s violating. No, it is the unwritten rules he believes everyone should play the game by. Continue Reading →
Falcon Lake
In Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman, we see a young girl meet another in the woods. Soon we learn the latter girl happens to be a literal younger manifestation of the former’s mother. In Charlotte Le Bon’s debut film, Falcon Lake, a pre-pubescent boy falls in love for the first time with the daughter of a family friend in a campsite supposedly haunted by a ghost. Continue Reading →