tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8030122497835592122024-03-13T11:10:23.314-04:00The Voracious FilmgoerThe Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.comBlogger1480125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-43961812930812557232024-03-10T14:43:00.003-04:002024-03-10T14:44:22.666-04:00The Voracious Filmgoer's Top Ten Films of 2023 The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-75199069275791768492024-03-10T14:21:00.011-04:002024-03-10T14:21:51.088-04:00Other Bests of 2023Best Cinematography (Film):Asteroid CityThe Iron ClawKillers of the Flower MoonOppenheimerPoor ThingsBest Cinematography (Digital):The CreatorThe HoldoversMagic Mike’s Last DanceMay DecemberJohn Wick Chapter 4Best Sound:John Wick Chapter 4Killers of the Flower MoonOppenheimerSpider-Man: Across the Spider-VerseThe Zone of InterestBest Stunts:The Iron ClawJohn Wick Chapter 4The KillerMission: The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-17111407217002653322024-02-25T20:18:00.003-05:002024-03-02T20:28:01.726-05:00Borne Back Ceaselessly: TENET (70mm Re-Release)Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is forever a present-tense movie where its now meets the past. Talk about a temporal pincer movement. Here I am, in late February 2024, having just stumbled out of an IMAX theater where I saw Tenet on 70mm in its limited re-release. I’d seen the movie only once before, when it was freshly on 4K Blu-ray in late December 2020. But I feel like I’ve now really seen it for The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-8316268328067141172024-02-24T00:28:00.002-05:002024-03-01T00:32:20.259-05:00Coen South: DRIVE-AWAY DOLLSNow that they’ve both made a movie without the other, we know exactly what each Coen brother brought to their 40-year filmmaking partnership. Joel took the somber philosophizing, precision image-making, and stark contrasts for his Tragedy of Macbeth. Ethan took the sprightly, irreverent, and capering plotting with oddball characters and eccentric details for Drive-Away Dolls. Smash the two The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-85700851874638282682024-02-03T00:24:00.002-05:002024-02-03T02:28:19.958-05:00All Artificial, No Intelligence: ARGYLLEIs this just what movies are going to be now? I sank in my seat as I asked myself that question while the deadening Argylle played out on screen. I dreaded the answer as my pessimism grew. The image was bright. The sound was loud. And I was entirely bored. The thing is just so phony I could hardly believe it as it grew worse by the second. The picture opens with an exaggerated goof on spy movie The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-384242810479348122024-01-28T20:22:00.004-05:002024-02-04T01:22:47.564-05:00Past Lives: THE ZONE OF INTERESTWriter-director Jonathan Glazer’s project is taking sub-genres that have hardened into particular closed modes and pushing out the walls until we see them from fresh angles. From these unusual perspectives he keeps us somehow entranced and alienated at the same moment by the way the films, so simultaneously stiff and slippery, get away from the expected. There’s his gangster movie drilled down The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-34684740822017432942024-01-01T23:06:00.000-05:002024-01-02T00:20:44.027-05:0025 Favorite New-to-Me Movies of 202325. Ernest Borgnine on the Bus (1997, Jeff Krulik)24. The Earth Dies Screaming (1964, Terence Fisher)23. Shopping (1994, Paul W.S. Anderson)22. Dolores Claiborne (1995, Taylor Hackford)21. Age of Panic (2013, Justine Triet)20. Lost and Delirious (2001, Léa Pool)19. Light Sleeper (1992, Paul Schrader)18. The Delta (1992, Ira Sachs)17. The Last Run (1971, Richard Fleischer) 16. Grey Gardens (1975, The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-52122369284197645902023-12-30T01:20:00.003-05:002023-12-30T01:20:33.716-05:00Broadway Rhythm: WONKA and THE COLOR PURPLEThose drawing connections between the current ongoing collapse of box office for big-budget Hollywood efforts in overfamiliar genres and the similar moment in the late-1960s might be chuffed to find Warner Brothers looking around at properties they own and asking: can we make that a musical? If we really are in a late stage for the current studio system, like 60 years ago, it should be little The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-25517930326566392632023-12-28T01:06:00.005-05:002023-12-28T13:29:38.502-05:00All Those Lonely, Lonely Times: ALL OF US STRANGERSAndrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is a palpable portrait of loneliness and the long tail of childhood grief. It’s a film that feels haunted with the intense emptiness that comes from a solitary life. It stars Andrew Scott as a writer just south of middle age who lives alone in a small apartment in a mostly uninhabited new building in London. Though the movie will technically leave this cramped The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-43203489425561790142023-12-18T21:10:00.001-05:002023-12-18T21:13:34.480-05:00Vindication of the Rights of Woman: POOR THINGSWith Poor Things, director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his pet themes: freedom and control, society and individualism, intellect and appetite. Within them, the Greek provocateur loves to push buttons and test the boundaries of discomfort. He sets up rigid systems and see his characters squirm under their demands. His international breakthrough Dogtooth is a tragedy set in a worst-case scenario The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-86243569750050446762023-12-10T01:15:00.002-05:002023-12-10T01:15:27.239-05:00How Do You Live: THE BOY AND THE HERONHayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron—though I prefer its more evocative Japanese title: How Do You Live—is a movie that feels intensely and beautifully like the work of an elderly man. This is hardly a negative when you’re in the hands of a master. The 82-year-old animator has given us such magical movies as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, pictures that sing with the simplicity of The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-32829740788207825282023-12-05T20:24:00.001-05:002023-12-05T20:24:20.273-05:00Notes on a Scandal: MAY DECEMBERTodd Haynes is a modern master of melodrama, with films that thrive in the tension of societal norms straining to restrain his characters’ natural drives toward it. In his latest film May December, an actress arrives at the home of a family that was once the center of tabloid controversy in hopes of shadowing them for her latest movie role based on their scandal. The actress (Natalie Portman) hasThe Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-23707503799630267512023-12-03T22:31:00.005-05:002023-12-06T00:58:34.545-05:00Infinity and Bey-ond: RENAISSANCE Beyoncé is the auteur of Beyoncé. She’s the director, on screen and off. Her public persona has been tightly controlled as she’s been able to consolidate all that power herself. She makes music, yes—among the catchiest of pulse-pounding danceable pop and soaring melodic ballads this century. But she’s also fashionable, political, and historical, alive and aware to her continuity as a brand, as a The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-89766172186532925212023-11-29T23:21:00.004-05:002023-12-15T01:55:43.298-05:00Flesh and Blood: NAPOLEONI wonder how many people know that the saying about history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, is a paraphrase of Karl Marx? Or how many know that he was talking about Napoleon and Napoleon’s nephew’s respective coups? Regardless, the quote was on my mind during Ridley Scott’s Napoleon because the film is at once a large-scale epic of combat and tragedy, and a scrambling The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-4592152340895553252023-11-26T19:59:00.003-05:002023-11-26T19:59:32.592-05:00Cruel Bummer: SALTBURNAfter two films, writer-director Emerald Fennell’s signature appears to be staging social satires with only a glancing understanding of society, ending in twists that call into question what in the world the earlier commentary was supposed to be setting up in the first place. Her Promising Young Woman had such a promising premise—a woman vigilante-style shaming male misbehavior—completely sunk byThe Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-78508511811632480702023-11-24T11:11:00.004-05:002023-11-24T15:06:28.008-05:00To Kill a Mockingjay: THE HUNGER GAMES: BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKESIf you needed a reminder that The Hunger Games remains a bracing and bleak blockbuster series with sharp-angled political ideas, here’s a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, to make its dystopian metaphors resonate anew. It takes us back to the world of Panem—a future United States where the gaudy one-percenters in the Capitol rule the rest of the country’s districts through intimidationThe Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-40667961232406216542023-11-14T21:00:00.003-05:002023-11-14T21:00:12.274-05:00Empty Man: THE KILLERWith The Killer, David Fincher renews his status as the premiere name in luxury brand pulp fiction. Here’s a film of cool surfaces and methodical plotting and a constant low-level thrum of tension. The lead character is a hit man who we meet as he sits in an abandoned Parisian WeWork loft, fastidiously and patiently waiting to snipe some rich guy in the penthouse across the nondescript street. The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-9079755465008474772023-11-11T19:53:00.001-05:002023-11-11T19:53:07.198-05:00Switch Off: THE MARVELSThe Marvels arrives on a wave of bad buzz for the Marvel Cinematic Universe that has fans and critics and showbiz reporters wringing their hands about the troubled state of the series. What once prided itself on a kind of comic-book style improvised cross-over continuity has floundered as the movies and TV shows have felt less connected. And even when parts of a particular project hit big The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-16159336714577481512023-11-01T20:16:00.001-04:002023-12-20T19:29:19.497-05:00In Loco Parentis: THE HOLDOVERSAlexander Payne’s The Holdovers is a wintery character drama about feeling gloomy, and lost, and lonely. But it’s also full of warmth and sentimentality crackling like a warm fire in the form of human connection and memory. Of course it’s set at Christmastime. Payne here knows well what Charles Dickens knew with A Christmas Carol and Frank Capra knew with It’s a Wonderful Life and Charles SchultzThe Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-39532304856360191422023-10-29T12:45:00.003-04:002023-10-29T12:45:49.089-04:00Dead Reckoning: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOONThere’s a storm on the plains. Thunder and lightening rumble in the distance. Rain drops on the farmhouse in a steady drumbeat. The white man (Leonardo DiCaprio) goes to close a window. The indigenous woman (Lily Gladstone) stops him. The storm is powerful, she tells him. Give it your attention. It must be paid respect. And so they sit, she meditatively, he uncomfortably, as the rain falls. The The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-10770759730533136562023-10-16T19:42:00.017-04:002023-11-30T23:02:34.893-05:00Hits Different: TAYLOR SWIFT: THE ERAS TOURAs if Taylor Swift wasn’t already a big deal, the Eras Tour further cemented her already secure place as one of the top pop acts of this century. Every stop on her concert brought out thousands of screaming fans lucky (or wealthy) enough to score a ticket. There they’d witness a lengthy whirlwind tour of each album in her career’s evolution—from her debut albums as a Fearless country teen to her The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-38771383450464123162023-10-06T19:14:00.002-04:002023-10-17T01:14:00.873-04:00Bedeviled: THE EXORCIST: BELIEVERThe reason why no sequel or spinoff of The Exorcist has managed to capture the deep, raw scares of the first is that William Friedkin’s original film of William Peter Blatty’s pulp religious fright novel is the only one that feels like it’s happening in something like the real world. Friedkin gives it the ominous undertones of religious epic—from its desert opening to the light-and-shadow The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-70011115030484098462023-10-02T23:28:00.002-04:002023-10-02T23:28:16.020-04:00Love, Death & Robots: THE CREATORIn a time of Hollywood spectacles that can conjure up incredible digital wizardry to populate all manner of fantasy worlds, it is dispiriting how often it feels like visual effects that can take us anywhere are so often used to take us to a generic nowhere. The same templates of gloopy magics and yawning vistas can be so indifferently framed and formulaically deployed that we might as well stay The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-17224452187094201352023-09-28T21:49:00.004-04:002023-09-28T21:49:42.893-04:00The Old Men and the Guns: EXPEND4BLESExpend4bles is running into all the usual problems that can dog an aging franchise limping back into theaters—diminished energy, effort, and interest. The title of the latest is its creative peak. This action series started as an aging action star ensemble picture. Not a bad idea to put a black-ops squad of oldsters together, a Grumpy Old Men with guns and gore. Sylvester Stallone lead the chargeThe Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-803012249783559212.post-1334649457351931782023-09-26T22:26:00.022-04:002023-10-18T22:33:36.493-04:00Antisocial Network: DUMB MONEYDumb Money is a movie based on the true story of what can’t be any more than the second most important American event of January 2021. It can’t reference the actual most important event because recognizing the conspiratorial mob mentality of the January 6th capitol riots would be too much complexity for a surface-level story of the other internet-abetted swarm of those days. Remember the amateur The Voracious Filmgoerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18047409667180496331noreply@blogger.com0