Throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s film, the line between miracle and cosmic prank, even tragedy, is rendered indistinguishable.
Like most of Sorrentino’s films, Loro is closer to a stylistic orgy than an existential rumination on Italy’s heritage.
The hygienization of Rio into what at times looks like a soulless Southern California town is so scandalous it feels like a spoof of the Cities of Love series.
As ever, writer-director Paolo Sorrentino ironically cuts the legs out from under his protagonists’ wistfulness with grotesquerie.
The one saving grace of Sicario is the considerable talent of cinematographer Roger Deakins.
This gorgeous, yet slimly supplemented, release places the film in the ideal cultural context: as last year’s ultimate art-house party movie.
There’s a great line in Jules and Jim about fictions that “revel in vice to preach virtue.”
The film succumbs to its own self-delusions of moral/political grandeur.
This Must Be the Place believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.
Drive’s narrative trajectory goes down a long and winding road into hell.
Il Divo is a ballet on steroids, downright militaristic in its precision.
Il Divo treats the scandal that brought down Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti with acerbic bemusement.
Nothing could possibly prepare you for the overwhelming mindfuckery that is Synecdoche, New York.