Hollywood – Lola On Film

Priscilla

There was a void, endless and dark, in the comfort of Priscilla’s existence. As well as love, disturbingly abusive yet enduring. And Sofia Coppola nailed all that queasy glamour and somnambulic psychosexual malaise to a tee. Spaeny is alike a silent-era screen siren, conveying an incredible range of emotions, without words. ★★★★☆
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Dune: Part Two

A triumph of style over substance, its sophisticated visuals barely managing to prop up a dialogue that seems to have been written on cocktail napkins. The sadomasochistic glee of the House Harkonnen appearing as an exercise in kinky fashion, their B/W world amplifying the feel of a Vogue spread dedicated to alternative lifestyles. ★☆☆☆☆
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Maestro

A prolonged fashion mag photoshoot, with a perfunctory script included — until its very end, when it decides to become an actual biopic of Lenny Bernstein, the celebrated American conductor and composer, yet far too late to make amends for the glossy tedium of the entire proceedings. A cocktail mix of the brilliant and the…
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Oscars 2024, Redacted

The 96th Academy Awards was not a corker, by any measure, more of a sprawling end-of-empire endeavour, with bad comedy writing, tired quips and tropes, and a bit of fresh individual pizzazz — a show which would have veered towards certain oblivion, if it not for the severe incongruity of the fantasy of the Oscars…
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Nyad

An earnest biopic on a fascinating character, played with great complexity by Annette Bening, a force of nature, employed in this story to full artistic capacity. It has an almost documentary feel to it, which, in a narrative film, could be a double-edged sword. Here, by being hindered in places by its own meticulousness in…
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Killers Of The Flower Moon

A sweeping mea culpa of the (Wild) West, and conspicuously lacking in any of the usual Hollywood glamourisations of the greed that built an Empire, Scorsese’s truly honourable and praiseworthy adaptation of Grann’s bestseller is also a study in why films should never be too respectful of any topic beyond the duty to their own…
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A Haunting In Venice

Based on Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, and accomplished that it is, this whirlwind spectacle comes out short in the one thing that matters most in a mystery – the story itself. Its psychological elements seem to be suffocated by their own locality, unable to gain any independence from the phantasmagorical scenery of Venice. ★★☆☆☆
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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Despite Daniel Craig’s fabulous Southern Belle, pastel-coloured play at James Bond, this oddly fragmented whodunit is more pastiche than a sequel — a collage of clever, lovingly shaped skits struggling to join the narrative stream of a single story, albeit with some of the best cameos in the business. Rides the coattails of its stellar…
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Dune

If it had been an eight minute short, with the electrical Rampling, as Reverend Mother Mohiam, pain-testing the blank slate that is Paul Atreides, to gauge his suitability for the job of a Messiah, I would have given it a five-star. However, it is over two hours long, and feels more like a scattered conversation…
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Black Humour in Serbian Films of the Early Eighties

Examining the dark heart of laughter the symbiotic relationship of film and its audience, wiring us to think and talk in certain ways, its cultural impact, its myriad semiotic and cinematic legacies – this was my MA dissertation (Birkbeck, 2005), a bungy jump into Serbian (and YU) 80s cinema, four films, two filmmakers, Šijan and…
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From Door Frame to Freeze Frame: Femmes Ante Portas

Encountering feminine mysteries on celluloid, a post-Jungian analysis of the veneration of the Hollywood film icon, tracing the blazing trail of cinema femme fatales, their imagery framed in portals, where darkness and light meet, the heroines gazing back at us, in defiance, transforming into a new fluid form of femme fatale as action figure.
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Mank

A story of authorship, public opinion, singing for one’s supper, screwing over of a popular progressive candidate by the Hollywood propaganda machine (before Sanders, there was Upton Sinclair), and the making of Citizen Kane. A rare tribute to writing in film, one of the most honest depictions of Hollywood that Hollywood delivered. ★★★★☆
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Fallen Women of Hollywood Melodrama: 1930s-1950s

Exploring the myth of the fallen woman in classic Hollywood melodrama, its historical, religious and literary antecedents, archetypal realms of the dark, wild feminine projected onto the screen, her impact on the spectator. A dispossessed femininity, fragmented and demonised, yet powerfully vibrant and creative.
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Golden Globes 2020: Anarchy, Pomp & Circumstance

The human need for a pedestal exists to look up at something that is, ultimately, to be achieved. The social contract breaks when the chosen begin to look down at the rabble. In his roast to end all roasts, the host of the 2020 Globes, Ricky Gervais, in eight golden minutes of television, reminded us…
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Judy

A gold standard Hollywood biopic, with melodrama sentiments & fan mail, pale devastation of the flesh smoothed over by flashbacks re-visioning studio corruption and emotional abuse as a technicolor Oz nightmare. At its center, is a performance so raw, tender, and gut-wrenching that all the glitz only serves as a mere proverbial curtain. ★★★★☆
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Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

An apt allegory for the delusional arc of Hollywood, its downfall lies in the fact that this insight is most definitely accidental. A showreel glorifying the industry of canned dreams, in a backhanded kind of way, it does that pimp thing where it tries to sell you the very stuff it mocks. Its one redeeming…
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Chernobyl HBO: Seeing In The Dark

The only way to look at Chernobyl is through the complex ocular shield of the camera, otherwise we stare at Medusa’s face, unprotected — an open nuclear reactor core burning our synapses through sheer magnitude of existential incomprehension. This is a piece of popular art offering the bleakest narrative, yet the audience rushed to it…
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Tag: Hollywood