CASUALTIES OF ART: Creating Authenticity and Consuming Aesthetics in Ripley
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ABSTRACT (or the TL;DR version of the full review)
In this mock-essay, the author uses a pseudo-academic and faux-professional format to dissect Steven Zaillian’s adapted series Ripley (2024). The series itself uses Tom Ripley’s identity theft as an instrument to dissect the nature of art, how art is produced, how it gains authenticity, and how it is consumed in the classist, capitalist world. Although these themes are present in Patricia…

COSMIC PALIMPSEST 
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Syndromes and the Century challenges the expectation that we must be able to weave together people's stories from film narratives, or that their trajectories must form a satisfactory arc. In the first half, we visit the world of young doctors, a dentist, monks, and a few other disarming characters at a rural hospital as they charm us with their everyday human concerns and pique our interest in their lives. Because this is an Apichatpong Weerasethakul t, not a Thai version of…

AMERICAN ASSWIPE: Laughing All the Way to Cruelty
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In the tradition of ruining humor by explaining it—something that’s plentily toyed with in The Comedy, I’ll have to justify the vulgarity in my title. Soon after the film starts, protagonist Swanson (comedian Tim Heidecker) leisurely munches on cookies, sips scotch, as he watches a nurse tending to his comatose father. In an off-hand obnoxious manner that we’ll come to see again and again, Swanson wonders out loud how the nurse,…

ONE FOOT IN, ONE FOOT OUT
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With that title—named after the film’s depraved serial killer—Longlegs sure trips over itself big time. Blame the coordination problem on having one overworked leg that gets in the way of the other clumsy one. Not only does the aesthetic polish overshadow the narrative merits, it makes the undercooked and flawed story more obvious.

Starting with what Longlegs does well, the film has style and atmosphere in spades. Osgood Perkins meticulously and methodically builds…

THIEVES IN THE TEMPLE AND THE BANISHMENT OF THE FEMININE
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Covert machinations, fiendish backstabbing, secret alliances, sartorial pagaentry, and carefully placed jewelry. Those words describe the internecine backstage drama among the drag performers on RuPaul’s Drag Race’s Untucked Lounge as well as they do Edward Berger’s Conclave. The film is a tour of the sausage factory (in more ways than one with the sausage metaphor) about how the Roman Catholic Church decides who will be the next Supreme Pontiff. Catholic electors from all…

DILUVIAL ADVENTURES WITH NO COMPULSORY REPRODUCTION 
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A house cat, a capybara, a Labrador retriever, a lemur, and a secretarybird walk onto a sailboat… Once I saw the big-eyed black cat on the poster, I knew I needed to see this movie. And what a joy that was (thank you, “NJ”) to watch it while two house cats took turns sitting on my lap (the third thinks he’s too cool to be a lap cat). Not just for the cat…