Baker’s Cannes hit promises a volatile, anxiety-fest of a cinematic experience, pumped up by Mikey Madison’s outstanding performance as a stripper who has a ‘fairytale marriage’ to the son of a Russian oligarch, though it doesn’t always work triumphantly in its latter half.
Minervini’s work about the real America i.e. the disturbia of the working-class provokes with its sheer no-bullshit honesty, with an invisible camera that gives zero distinction between drama and documentary.
A cult horror classic from early 1930s Hollywood with visual effects work that remains mind-boggling today, as an experiment gone wrong causes an increasingly erratic scientist to become invisible and immensely powerful.
Themes of ‘identity’ and ‘role-playing’ swirl intensely in this decent offering starring the Berlinale award-winning Sebastian Stan, who plays a disfigured man who begins to morph into a normal-looking person after an experimental clinical trial.
With incredible abandon and ambition, Coppola’s work, infused with Roman allegory, is staggering in terms of craft despite its rather clunky storytelling, as a time-controlling architect hopes to rebuild a new utopian city that is future-looking.
A meaningful social initiative to connect young daughters with their incarcerated fathers is the subject of this rewarding Sundance award-winning documentary that might be one of the most moving films of the year.
Way too stilted and spiritless performances mar Schoenbrun’s aesthetically ‘flamboyant’ but ultimately vacant feature about gender and mediated identities, as two teenage social misfits find a human connection over a long-running television show that mysteriously gets cancelled.
Lanthimos’ weakest work since ‘Alps’ is an uneven if morbid triptych of stories that operate as playful, nihilistic exercises at best, led by Cannes Best Actor winner Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone.
McElwee’s intended docu-travelogue about General Sherman’s American Civil War campaign turns into a narcissistic look at his faltering romantic exploits with the Southern women around him, yet its unabashed subjectivity feels surprisingly fresh and compelling.
There is enough time-ticking tension to make the age-old formula work to some extent, though it can also feel emptily spectacular but still somewhat entertaining in this half-decent entry to the ‘Alien’ franchise.
Eternality Tan 