Lola On Film

Tag: lola on film

First Man

Elegantly cutting through Cold War politics, slippery metaphors on masculinity, the now archaic technologies yet still very raw societal injustices, the audacity of a venture building up as monumental ego trip of a nation — this is a story that finds its heart in a silence, mystery of the inner cosmos. The micro and macro aligned.…
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The Other Side Of Everything

It lands on a piece of me that is yet to accept loss – the devouring of a chunk of my life by the gods of lesser value. This is why I could not take it in any other way than lightly. My full attention would’ve meant giving in to a lack of meaning. A…
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Film vs. Death: One More Time With Feeling

A testament to the inexplicability of mourning, the therapeutic nature of art. In this case, the art of the moving image, the most conjuring art of all. The camera becomes a dignified way to navigate the grieving process, to share. This is film as communion, echo of a longing, an evocation of love in that eternal painfully…
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Maria By Callas

It was the humanity in the delivery of divinity that was the key to Callas’s impact, the way she knew, by some uncanny ability, just how to channel an archetype. We do not learn more of Maria Callas than she herself would allow, but we understand, instinctively, how much a gift like hers overtakes a…
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My Cousin Rachel

The ill-fated relationship seems to be merely the departure not the destination, the anti-climatic tryst itself making way for a rather sombre study of cultural prejudice and misogyny. A sophisticated exploration of the consequences of an active and complex female sexuality in what polite society designated to be a woman’s timid, matronly years. ★★★☆☆
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The Happy Prince

Everyone feels they know much of Oscar Wilde, the ultimate prophet laureate of pop culture, but no one can really come close to grasping a micron of that man’s life until they understand Clapham Junction. If Oscar was not so loud, proud and unrepentant, would he have been made to suffer humiliation as much by…
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The Tale

A wound festering, sexual damage mentally packaged as a taboo love affair, an irreversible seduction interpreted as consensual in the imaginings of a 13-year-old girl determined to preserve the right of her passage to womanhood. Artistic faults, and inconsistencies be damned, this film is an act of pure courage, a masterclass in honesty. ★★★★☆
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First Reformed

As the contemplative pace and mundane minutia carries on, it becomes a precious exercise in observing one’s own boredom threshold. In the end, it swept me like high tide, much as a windfall of good luck can disorient us when we are deep in mourning – this painful, beautiful, essential meditation on isolation, how we…
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How To Talk To Girls At Parties

If the Sex Pistols, Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and X-Files had a threesome and spawned one single entity, you’d get John Cameron Mitchell’ s zany yet weirdly ordinary love story. For all its vulgarian chutzpa, punk DIY ethos, and visual high jinx, it’s a boy-meets-girl-loses-girl, makes it in the world, but is still lonely, kind of tale. ★★☆☆☆
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Revenge

This grindhouse slice of rough is as bloody as they get. But once you transcend the gore, the sheer originality of its dynamics, the ingenious transgression of its point of view, which happens to be a according to a woman’s frame, makes it a thrill ride of mythic proportions. An ancient tale of retribution —…
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Beast

A charming, filthy, sexy stranger saves a lass from an unwanted advance, tells her he will fix her, the Kundalini starts rising, and the two embark on both a joyous and chilling folie à deux, to the horror of her family. A Colt 45 of a film, silver bullet of dark erotica, fertile pathology, a…
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Funny Cow

Peake is the eponymous funny cow, a woman with no escape other than in endless repetition of family history, class mentality, gender predicament. This is no comedy — not that it isn’t darkly funny, depicting humour not as a relief, but at the centre of the disease. A punctured ulcer reeking of that which it…
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Isle Of Dogs

The source of magic behind Wes Anderson’s incredible creations, a blend of innocence and weltschmerz, is that he stays true to himself — an outsider to the worlds he creates, but which he loves, absolutely. This gives his work an affectionate, deeply intellectual quality, what reviewers and industry professionals like to call ‘whimsy’. ★★★★☆
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Custody

There is no horror quite like the murderous rage of someone you once loved. If you experienced anything similar, consider Legrand’s explosive separation drama as homeopathic remedy. With enough guts to shatter the audience with the actual intensity of a violence done by the closest of people, the inner distance to reality it creates. ★★★★★
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Unsane

Shot entirely on an iPhone, this is Soderbergh’s new twist on his road to revolutionising craft, if not necessarily art. A stalkerish quality to it, a crispness and fake intimacy of a social media profile — an immediacy that makes it tenfold more horrifying than if it was digested through the geometrical complexity of a…
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Loveless

An eulogy to humanity lost, the severing of connections in the fetishisation of the material — an absence, rather than a presence. A dark jewel, which, when observed against the light, shows no reflection. This lack of illumination envelops the viewer slowly, through stark images, an emotional catastrophe that goes unnoticed. ★★★★★
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The Shape Of Water

Guillermo del Toro’s intoxicating burst of goodness celebrates connection, the space in-between, a quiet reading of heartbeats, the way we dance inside when we are touched by another, the need to merge regardless of all obstacles, the twinship we seek and rarely find, sacrifices we are willing to make when we are recognised. ★★★★★
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Oscars 2018: Eating Cake

The Academy finally deciphered the writing on the wall, and promptly took their high-heeled shoes off, the entire spectacle meandering into something of an after-party at your agent’s house – half mercenary opportunism, half boozy honesty. What the aftermath of this will be is that the industry will soak in all the good intentions, appropriate…
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Phantom Thread

So many layers of refinement, so many clever traps to fall through, so much good filmmaking on the table to be relished, savoured, devoured. Could not put a finger on what bothered me after watching it. It’s a love story for narcissists, deceptively tender to the touch, an exquisite cashmere cardigan concealing its cold heart.…
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Berlinale, Take Two.

Amidst the pomp, the circumstance, and the tightly wrapped boxes, there are the staff working for the Berlinale Service Centre who are not only incredibly helpful, but also smart, sweet, and informed. Organisationally, it is not only a festival of excuses (as one insightful employee put it), it is a festival of extremes. Gliding between…
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The Festival Of Fences

An ambivalent mixture of sophisticated programming, great variety, lovely surfaces, all the shades of pink amidst a well-oiled division between fans/stars, outsiders/insiders, and talents/audience. It’s not a surprise, only serves as a timely reminder of just how long this has gone unchecked all across the industry. Social exclusion has many faces, the most obvious ones…
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Molly’s Game

Chastain manages to portray what it is like to have integrity and drive in equal measure in a world designed by men, none of whom in Molly’s life did anything to make it easier. If there were offers for help, they came with a price tag. A high standard courtroom drama, conveying something preciously true,…
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Personal Shopper

A slick, informed take on the demon within, twinship, and ghosts, in general. What they are, where they hide, and when they appear. Stewart fidgets her way through her onscreen twin’s death, thirsting for final contact, in lieu of their pact. Glossy millennial ghost story that wants to take itself seriously and not seriously at…
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Darkest Hour

Oldman playing Churchill was a genius stroke of casting, both men fireballs of passion, eloquence and wit. Nothing should have stood in the way of this performance. But it did, so it ended with a thud, not an elation. Saying NO to the devil after walking through the valley of the shadow of death for…
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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Frances McDormand is an Old Testament act of God, all wrath and unrelenting righteousness, avenger of womanhood desecrated, mother archangel of lost causes. But what touched me most in this film was Sam Rockwell’s performance, a potty-mouthed small town cop, with a racist streak, who privately likes to dance to ABBA. ★★★★☆
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All The Money In The World

The story touches the core of an issue that is difficult to summarise under the hackneyed sin of greed. Because greed is about trust. This should have been a masterpiece. But it’s not. Because it was rushed. If you are Ridley Scott, you can speed up craft, and get away with it, and that’s a…
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I, Tonya

There’s great heart in Robbie taking on a national joke, a second-hand villain, turning her into a quiet hero, in all her vulnerable garishness, her terrier posture, her awkward dignity. There was no inherent violence in Tonya, it was her inner grace that shaped her incredible talent. To get this point through was a thespian…
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Lola says…

Deconstructing the spectacle, measuring empty calories, offering nutritional insights on films newly released, as well as archival treasures, assessing the state of film culture, exploring new formats & illuminating cinema’s place in society, as well as in our individual psychology.
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