Grace Notes

On Damnation, Hellfire and Other Such Irrevocable Facts Concerning the Mortal Vessel in Oppenheimer

“It’s the bomb that didn’t go off. The threat that no one knew was there- that’s the bomb with the real power to change the world”. -Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020) “I am banished from the patient men who fight They smote my heart to pity, built my

Past Lives

Originally published 16/07/23 on Letterboxd Can’t help but feel that this is far too considered and dramaturgically suffocating for what it is, and it never quite rids itself of the reek of faux-profound Sundance slop, but this is otherwise a pretty impressive debut feature (even if so

All That Heaven Allows

Two capsules on the film, each from a different platform: Originally published on Letterboxd on 13/07/23 One of those rarefied works of art that brings tears to my eyes not because of the magnitude of emotional turmoil on display, but because of how gloriously radiant its images are.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Originally published 11/07/23 on Letterboxd Worthless slurry of computer-generated sludge and hollow nostalgia. For all its absence of Spielberg’s generally fine-tuned sense of pacing and momentum, Crystal Skull’s earnest fascination with the semiotics of 50s pulp serials, alien invasions and the legacy of the atom bomb

Sundance London 2023: You Hurt My Feelings

Originally published 09/07/23 on Letterboxd A pleasantly low-stakes, languorous Late-style picture about taking comfort in mediocrity. There’s a rather acerbic dryness to this, where Holofcener seems to be lambasting herself as much as she does the upper-middle-class professionals with cushy jobs that she so acutely paints an

Sundance London 2023: Mysterious Skin

Originally published 08/07/23 on Letterboxd “As we sat there listening to the carolers, I wanted to tell Brian that it was over now and that everything would be okay. But that was a lie, plus I couldn't speak anyway. I wish there was some way to go back

Sundance London 2023: Passages

Originally published 08/07/23 on Letterboxd Wrote about the film more extensively here, but what this viewing months after Berlin has solidified is that unlike most of the ephemeral festival-circuit pastel-hued queer dramas that the film’s co-opting by MUBI has lent itself to seemingly being part of, it

Sundance London 2023: The Doom Generation

Originally published 07/07/23 on Letterboxd GOD IS DEAD AND NO ONE CARES IF THERE IS A HELL I’LL SEE YOU THERE Remains the most violently horny film I’ve ever seen. Araki draws from the semiotics of queer literature and Old Hollywood so often and so liberally,

Crash

Originally published 02/07/23 on Letterboxd Watching this while exhausted at 3:30 am merely heightens its already potent somnambulant qualities. As with every Cronenberg this only reveals itself more with time, but what I was struck by this time around was less to do with the steeliness of

No Hard Feelings

Originally published on 27/06/23 on Letterboxd Don’t have much to say about this one besides the obligatory “JLaw please crush my windpipe with a sledgehammer” but I liked this quite a bit. Surprisingly sweet (but not saccharine) throwback to the now-extinct sex comedy that handles the technical

Bastards

Originally published 21/06/23 on Letterboxd “Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter

Apocalypse Now

Originally published 18/06/23 on Letterboxd Some words I wrote in relation to Assayas’ Demonlover here, which continue to apply to this horrifyingly singular work: In 1987, Jean Baudrillard published his continuation of his discussion of the image introduced in his seminal Simulacra and Simulation. Titled The Evil Demon

The Flash

Originally published on Letterboxd on 14/05/23 Truly awe-inspiring in the degree of pure incompetence and resignation from everyone involved that it embodies. This is a Grand Guignol carousel of computer-generated abominations, each more conjured with more cynicism than the last. There are moments where it seems truly confounding

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Originally published on Letterboxd on 09/05/23 Went to see this because I was feeling mildly suicidal, needed a distraction of some sort and the place playing it was nearby, so in that regard- not bad! (though by the fifth time someone in the film uttered the word “canon”

Mildred Pierce

Originally published on Letterboxd on 08/05/23 Think my experience of seeing my first Joan Crawford picture in a theatre- something I was looking forward to immensely- was discoloured by receiving an extremely unfortunate piece of news right as it was about to begin, as well as being informed

Coming to you live from the apocalypse: The potent paranoia of Gregg Araki’s Nowhere

Originally published on 05/06/23 for Little White Lies Article available at above link.

Berlinale 2023: ‘Afire’ Review

Originally published on 26/05/23 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal In 1938, the first edition of Gustav Schwab’s Sagen des klassischen Altertums (Gods and Heroes: Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece), was published, becoming almost immediately a key text on the guiding myths of antiquity. Schwab,

Berlinale 2023: ‘Passages’ Review

Originally published on 26/05/23 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal One of the first distinct sounds amidst a background of chatter in Ira Sachs’ Passages is that of a clapperboard. A line delivery is repeated-nay, hammered– into the ground until the imperious director overseeing the scene, Tomas

Berlinale 2023: ‘BlackBerry’ Review

Originally published on 26/05/23 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal At the centre of Matt Johnson’s long-awaited followup to Operation Avalanche is a shiny, gleaming surface- one that often acts as the sole form of light illuminating both drab corporate boardrooms and the way forward for

Beau is Afraid

Originally published on Letterboxd on 16/05/23 Aster’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Obviously owes much of its existence to Kaufman and the Coens, and it certainly doesn’t shy away from brazen pastiche of Twain and Roth, but the degree to which Aster projects his neuroses onto

Some Things Are Beyond Forgiveness

Originally published on Letterboxd on 12/05/23 “The feeling of being forgiven by another and forgiving oneself are so much alike, there's no point in trying to keep them distinct”. In the text of JG Ballard’s science fiction, there is often a seemingly universal acknowledgment that physical trauma

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Originally published on Letterboxd on 04/05/23 “Comes an age in a man's life when he don't wanna spend time figuring what comes next…” Ruthlessly self-reflexive as a western- as swift and brutal as the bloodshed is here, the archetypical Peckinpah journey towards the abyss is tempered by an

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Originally published on Letterboxd on 05/05/23 He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and

The Counselor

Originally published on 29/04/23 on Letterboxd “Machado would have traded every word, every poem, every verse he ever wrote for one more hour with his beloved. And that is because when it comes to grief, the normal rules of exchange do not apply, because grief transcends value. A

The Passenger

Originally published on 27/04/23 on Letterboxd “At first he was elated... Really high. Faces... Colors... Landscapes. But then everything began to change. The world was much poorer than he imagined. No one had ever told him how much dirt there was. How much ugliness. He noticed ugliness everywhere.