The premise of renting people to fill social roles resembles Werner Herzog’s FAMILY ROMANCE, LLC or Yorgos Lanthimos’ ALPS. Still, Bernhard Wenger, the film’s writer and director, takes the film in a different direction that feels very Östlund-esque but without Östlund’s satirical bite. As the film concludes, it feels like it has pulled its punches a little.
Though THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA alludes to broader themes around media production and how broadcast media edits narratives to cut out the messy humanity of people’s lives, the film focuses on telling an entertaining story and highlighting Hauser’s performance.
Though at first THE END seems like a strange direction for Joshua Oppenheimer, the themes of repression, denial, and delusion soon make a clear connection between this and his documentary work.
TORNADO’s blending of genres is not always entirely successful, occasionally creating an uncanny feeling, but the film isn’t afraid to proudly showcase its influences and try something new with them.
Watching in 2025, we unfortunately know that the story of American neo-fascism has only continued, and so the ending of documentary HOMEGROWN seems both sad and premature.
STEALING PULP FICTION has an ironic postmodern sensibility combining a reverence for cinema and the cinema-going experience – midnight screenings, overflowing tubs of popcorn, the smell of 35mm prints – with an ironic appreciation of Quentin Tarantino’s own postmodern work.
While it’s visually striking and Crispin Glover gives a wonderful performance as the main character, MR. K’s web of allusions to other works grows a little thin and leaves you wondering what the film says on its own.
PRESENCE may be destined to simply be another formally experimental work for Soderbergh, but there is enough compelling drama and character work that it deserves more consideration than that.
Andrea Arnold’s latest film, BIRD, is a beguiling blend of British social realism and magical realism, exposing the deep yearning towards nature in a dying England left adrift at the end of the world.
WOKEN is a sci-fi thriller that packs a punch disproportionate to its small scale and short length. Despite some unfortunately clumsy tropes deployed in the third act, WOKEN still has enough twists and turns and enough contemporary relevance to be a thriller worth checking out.
