Ashby Returns from the Afterlife.
The Holdovers.
Directed by Alexander Payne.

   Alexander Payne once stated about his work and life in the following quote: "I get asked, 'How can you have such failures in your films?' Well, what else is life about? There's some sense of constant failure in something. Humor gives you a distance from it." When people complain about a movie having "failures," it speaks of their interest in stories with no interest in the human condition…

               The ion of Screenwriting. 
                 Written by Blake Patterson. 

                 Chapter One: Introduction

    “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed,” stated by director Stanley Kubrick. At the beginning of cinema, screenwriters could only project ideas through movement. The lack of sound at the time was a barrier to be deal with. Once sound…

For all the comparisons to Taxi Driver in 2018, Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here is so unique as a feature film that the comparison is superficial. The film concerns a traumatized veteran (Joaquin Phoenix's Joe) who tracks down and rescues missing girls for a living and is on a mission to find a senator's daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov's Nina Samsonov) while dealing with nightmares that affect him more deeply as time es. While Scorsese's 1976 masterpiece was integral to…

Next Best Picture says Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness is “a brilliantly scathing takedown of the wealthy and beautiful.” And The Square was “a brilliantly scathing takedown of” the Left’s hypocrisies. Facetiousness aside, Östlund is, quite possibly, the worst arthouse filmmaker and satirist working today. Östlund is the anti-Buñuel because he replaces subtlety and complexity with broadness and superficiality. While the aim is satirical, Östlund’s execution is unfunny and aggressively dull in how he exaggerates his contempt for the elite’s…

Unsatisfied Surrealism.
I Saw the TV Glow.
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun.

   The image that will likely define Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow is the motif of an ice cream truck with a mix of pink and purple smoke coming from it. The motif is a metaphor for the idealism of nostalgia and the negative aftermath later, as the main character Owen (Ian Foreman as the younger version of Owen and Justice Smith as the older version of…