Julia Ducournau’s debut film Raw featured exquisite body horror and cannibalism as sexual awakening. For all its squickiness and extremity, it was also fully graspable as a film that a group of viewers could take in and arrive at a similar conclusion as to what it was trying to say. That’s not the case with Durcournau’s Palme d’Or winning follow-up Titane, a messier but more assured and daring film that frolics in the same visceral pool that Raw did. Digesting Titane is a more difficult task, but what’s easy is acclaiming Ducournau as a rising star with two unforgettable films to her name. Both ecstatic and repulsive, tense and hilarious, Titane is a gnarly sojourn through gender, male affection, and the attraction between a human and a car.
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Nicolas Cage, patron saint of ham, has a low hit rate. Whether for financial distress or a love of being on a set, the man doesn’t say no to much, regularly appearing in half-a-dozen or more films every year. Most of those go straight to video, never to be seen by anyone but bad-movie podcasters and insomniacs who’ve already watched every other movie in existence. However, Cage’s considerable talent sometimes runs into the right project and the viewing public remembers that under the accents and the random voice modulation and the bulging eyes is a man who can readily access depth and sincerity when he wants to. It’s only been three years since Cage’s last reminder, with Mandy and Into the Spider-Verse, but he’s amassed another 11 movies in that space. With Pig, Michael Sarnoski’s stunning debut, Cage puts away his high-volume theatricality for a quiet performance that, while lacking in volume, is missing none of the actor’s unforgettable presence. An untouchable lead performance paired with Sarnoski’s precise direction and a lacerating script makes Pig into one of the best films in recent memory, thus lending Cage the credibility to go make another ten straight-to-video money laundering schemes.
Sixteenth-century Italian monk and cosmologist Giordano Bruno famously and apocryphally pointed his finger at the people who would judge him as a heretic and yelled, “Your god is too small!” Bruno surmised that the universe contained life beyond what was found on earth, preaching a humility that a religion which says the supreme being created humans in its image cannot handle. Rigidity runs headlong into wonder in different Italian setting some five centuries later with Luca, Pixar’s latest and the first from longtime in-house animator Enrico Casarosa. A familiar story infused with palpable love and detail from Casarosa’s own life, Luca creates a world filled with joy and endless possibility, if one can only stick their head above the water.
By Jon Kissel Rumors of the death of movies were greatly exaggerated in 2021, at least from a quality standpoint. While box office receipts stayed down after 2020's total turtle-shelling, theaters remain open and there's no shortage of new films for them to show. AMC was saved by stonks, Regal has partnered with Matt Damon to bully customers into buying cryptocurrency, and streaming services continue to blast out content from a high-pressure hose. No major delays as of yet have put a damper on 2022, and while this coming year might be the one that sees cinema return to a profitable normal, it will be very difficult for it top 2021's creative output. Helped out by plenty of delayed films that otherwise would've belonged to 2020, 2021 has emerged as at least as great a movie year as 2018, possibly even competing with 2016. While I'm no enemy of depressive, contemplative fare, the theme of the year kept coming back to joy. It marked the best moments of French Dispatch and revereberated throughout wistful works like Licorice Pizza, Luca, and The Hand of God. Big hearted comedies like Bad Trip and Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar reveled in it, musicals like West Side Story and Summer of Soul generated it, and even gonzo French extremities like Titane and Benedetta reached for it between transgression and blasphemy. Who knows what the future will look like as commercial trends get uglier? For now, movies continue to be great! A new level of Jewish cringe comedy is reached in Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby. Seligman’s feature debut contains enough toe-curling awkwardness to make Larry David sit up and take notice, all contained within a party that’s not as extreme as the events of Darren Aronofsky’s mother! but reminiscent nonetheless. Adapted from a short, Shiva Baby piles tension and complication on its protagonist, a young woman of little accomplishment who’s confronted with judgmental relatives and the thorny untangling of her sexual escapades. Seligman meticulously lays out scenario after scenario to bedevil her lead, and the result is a tremendously watchable film even if it must occasionally be seen through hands over eyes.
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