image courtesy of indiewire.com Those reading glasses are doing some heavy lifting. That’s maybe the most honest way I can summarize this film - a film doing a lot of quiet, careful work, but one that also left me expecting something a little more, for lack of a better word, charged. I’ll admit my assumptions going in were off. A lesbian romance made in 1985, at the height of Reagan’s America, directed by a woman - I figured it would feel transgressive, raw, maybe even a litt

image courtesy of rottentomatoes.com I want to preface this by saying I suspect this is a better film than my rating suggests. The problem is almost certainly me. Before this, my Wong Kar-wai experience amounts to two films: In the Mood for Love, which is a stone-cold masterpiece, and Chungking Express, which I’ve only seen once and never quite found my way into. Unfortunately, this landed closer to the latter - I could admire it without fully connecting to it in the way it s

image courtesy of mubi.com My only prior experience with Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a single viewing of Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - an all-timer of a title - which I didn’t understand at all. So I came in expecting something equally surreal and impenetrable. It isn’t, exactly, but it is split into two entirely different films that may or may not be thematically linked, depending on how you look at it. The first half is a surprisingly swee

image courtesy of variety.com Sometimes, it’s best not to overcomplicate things to make your point. The greatest farces - think Airplane!, Clue, take your pick - succeed precisely because they target obvious, well-worn tropes and strip them down to their absurd essentials. Done poorly, that approach feels lazy and toothless. Done right, it lands like a sledgehammer wrapped in a feather boa. This mostly does it right. The film embraces every stereotype it can get its hands on

image courtesy of vulture.com Grief has been the subject of countless films. So has guilt. So has the long, painful road toward recovery. The “ghost story as emotional reckoning” device is hardly new, and it won’t retire after this. But I want to be clear: I deeply respect what Andrew Haigh is attempting here, and the vision behind this is genuinely ambitious. It just doesn’t fully stick the landing for me. Adam (Andrew Scott) is a writer hollowed out by loss - his parents di