Luke Hicks

Bodies Bodies Bodies feels like A24 trying to suck up to the cool kids––a vapid, perhaps successful attempt to reel in a contemporary influencer crowd. Enjoying it feels partially dependent on one’s familiarity with celebrity pop culture, the intricacies of tabloid news, and the ever-evolving landscape of political correctness.

The explosiveness and wavering intrigue and sleek blue-gray cinematography minted for a cop movie––the kind that reflects thematic consideration and well-crafted execution in matching the steeliness of its hard-nosed leads––can’t do enough to save it.

Broker marks a thematic continuation of career-length fascination with alternative families and the legal, social, and philosophical values that paint such complicated ethical portraits of them. The director still has plenty to say, and does so quite eloquently.

Among many films that tackle class, race, and privilege at Cannes this year ... War Pony is more subtle in its pursuit. The stories aren’t plotless but the emphasis isn’t on any one narrative conflict. Keough and Gammell make it more about witnessing the culturally and spiritually rich world of Pine Ridge.

Thirty minutes in—with all interesting ledes sufficiently buried or ignored, the charm of his husky southern drawl faded—you realize you’ve been conned into letting Coen take you on a YouTube train of his favorite Lewis performances and interviews. If you like Lewis’s sound, that’s fun for a short while. Then you realize he’s just playing the same songs on repeat and it starts to get annoying, as getting cornered at a party usually does.

It’s tough to watch a movie like Elvis and totally dismiss it, no matter how much of a trainwreck it might seem. Name a department that isn’t the Tom Hanks department and there’s plenty of creative work worth praising. It’s just utterly incoherent with the material—that’s even tougher to get past.

There’s never a moment of grand revelation; rather a subtle, perpetual sense of understanding what’s going on, a fact that takes some pressure off the film and will likely make for a richer rewatch.

Though struggling with some pacing issues, it’s mostly an engaging, well-performed drama that offers a fascinating peek into an institution matched in significance only by the Vatican itself.

At a lengthy 140 minutes, the film flashes by. The deeper you go the more you want to know, and the more there is to know.

Paris, 13th District wades in the strange, true interconnectedness of life and evokes the banality within, so much that it starts to become banal itself.

If The Year of the Everlasting Storm isn’t exempt from the typical disjointedness of portmanteau films, it yields more coherency than its kin. With so many disparate works included, the experience becomes an intriguing exercise in cinematographic range and creative perspectives on the most globally unifying trauma in human history.

It isn’t the most entertaining version of a Velvet Underground documentary, but it’s the truest to the group. Haynes hones in on character and new elements they brought to the table which, like elements of modern art, are best captured through philosophies and conceptual understanding, as they are here.