Grace Notes

Knock at the Cabin

“Always together.” He did it again. Easily one of the most distressing things I’ve ever seen. Shyamalan is one of my favourite working directors, and I would’ve expected nothing less than something impeccably taut that extracts as much agony from all the potential implications of the impossibilities he

Didn't You Feel Triumphant?

For better or worse, this is one of the few post-2010/post-image-hypersaturation films (along with Gone Girl and The Card Counter) to render, in all their prickly and discomforting detail, the conditions of modernity that transform the painful process of creating an identity into a branding exercise- that, for lack

The Rules of Attraction

Originally published on 16/12/22 on Letterboxd Gregg Araki for straight people. Deeply crass, in bad-taste and mostly abandons any of the (sparse) humanising qualities of Ellis' novel in favour of dialing up the ruthlessness of its satire and just generally making everyone twice as sociopathic. Probably one of

To Live and Die in L.A.

Originally published on Letterboxd on 16/12/22 Ain't nothing but muthafuckin' paper Hadn't seen this in years, so I was concerned that a favourite of mine (as well as both my introduction to the steely visage of William Petersen and the first time Friedkin really clicked for me as

LEAFF 2022: ‘The Roundup’ Review

Originally published on 08/12/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal Since his introduction to Western audiences as a veritable battering ram in Train to Busan, Ma Dong-seok’s unmistakable silhouette has only grown in magnitude, imbuing each of his performances with the enchanting aura of a genuine

Venice Film Festival 2022: 'TÁR' Review

Originally published on 18/11/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal In the opening minutes of Todd Field’s triumphant return to filmmaking after a 16-year hiatus, two lenses juxtaposing the dual nature of the contemporary image are presented in succession. Through the lens of a phone’s

Armageddon Time

Originally published on 16/11/22 on Letterboxd Have never really seen anything that reflects my childhood to the extent that this did- the unimaginable terror that a locked door can conjure in the mind of a child, the inability to understand why someone's voice quivers when they tell you

The Immigrant

Originally published on 11/11/22 on Letterboxd You are not nothing. In which Gray is possessed by the ghost of von Sternberg. Where it is less sustained as an exercise in metamorphosis of form than Gray's earlier oeuvre, it compensates in equal terms by lending the weight of aeons

Two Lovers

Originally published on 10/11/22 on Letterboxd Intensely, embarrassingly relatable in just about every way- the sort of film where you're momentarily reminded of your own equally agonizing experiences because of what its compositions gesture towards, before your memories unfurl onscreen in all their vivid, prickly detail. Much can

The Canyons

Originally published on 08/11/22 for Little White Lies Article available at above link.

The Yards

Originally published on 07/11/22 on Letterboxd The shadows of Miller and Kazan haunt its spaces, permeating and aggregating more and more of the frame until it resembles something malignant, like black mold, coating the faces of the worker and the capitalist alike with industrial decay. These shadows are

Smiley Face Killers

Originally published on 02/11/22 on Letterboxd Gangstalking: the movie. Went into this as research for another Ellis-scripted project I'm writing about, but discovered in its desolate suburban exteriors and pressingly incomplete interiors something far more unsettling than a mere experiment. What it proposes is nowhere near novel, but

London Film Festival 2022: 'The United States of America' Review

Originally published on 31/10/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal “I have a very simple definition of an artist. The artist is someone who pays attention and reports back.” In his remake (though reinterpretation may be a more fitting term) of his cross-country tone poem The United

London Film Festival 2022: ‘Pacifiction’ Review

Originally published on 31/10/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal ‘exploiting as much as judicious the resources of our own indigenous conceptual schemes in our philosophical meditations…’ (Kwasi Wiredu, Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy) In Albert Serra’s latest portrait of excess and institutional rot, the manifestation

London Film Festival 2022: ‘EO’ Review

Originally published on 18/10/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal Something that becomes apparent very swiftly about Polish genre maverick Jerzy Skolimowski’s first feature in 6 years, EO, is how strongly anchored it is to its surroundings. Nary a moment disrupts the illusion that we are

London Film Festival 2022: ‘Corsage’ Review

Originally published on 15/10/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal In Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, one of a litany of revisionist biographical dramas that seek to wrench screams of agony from the effacing demeanour of the past, there are not disturbances in the gilded cage of royalty

Venice Film Festival 2022: ‘The Kingdom: Exodus’ Review

Originally published on 13/10/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal 28 years ago, von Trier’s Riget (also known as The Kingdom) hit Danish television sets across the country, setting the stage for a tapestry of slapstick comedy, workplace drama and body horror that cemented the endlessly

Venice Film Festival 2022: 'White Noise' Review

Originally published on 13/10/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal Noah Baumbach’s latest tale of familial strife (and his first adaptation) opens with a montage of distinctly American impulses- the juxtaposition between external and internal release of psychosexual repression. The car crash, an internal channeling of

Are You Still Watching? Demonlover and the Spectre of Voyeurism

Originally published on 10/10/22 for Bright Lights Film Journal

Something Male in Every Woman and Female in Every Man: Gender and the Cronenbergian Body

Originally published on 28/09/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal The space occupied by the body as an inseparable component of the built environment has existed since perhaps the very inception of cinema as a medium. Examining the very beginnings of the medium, it is evident that

LIFF 2022: Urf

Originally published on 14/09/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal In 2016, the project that director Maneesh Sharma had intended to be his debut 10 years prior finally manifested. Fan had been long anticipated as SRK’s return to the dual role, which characterized the most positively

LIFF 2022: Once Upon a Time in Calcutta

Originally published on 13/09/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal Earlier last year, the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India aroused controversy when an advertisement praising the party’s development of Uttar Pradesh province featured the Maa flyover in the city of Kolkata (West Bengal). The

Hulk

Originally published on 18/08/22 on Letterboxd "They're absorbing all the ambient energy" Immeasurably moving. There's not really a way for me to talk about why this film is so important to me that doesn't sound like an extended confessional, but that is precisely why it's so effective. In

LIFF 2022: Do Baaraa

Originally published on 18/08/22 for the UCL Film & TV Society's Journal “Gangs of Wasseypur has been my greatest undoing” This was Anurag Kashyap’s response to being asked about the film at a Q&A held after the premiere of his latest film, Do Baara (or alternatively, Dobaaraa,

Decision to Leave

Originally published on Letterboxd on 08/18/22 As with most of Park's oeuvre, this is mostly an impressive formal object that I can admire from a distance but from which little else can be derived. That being said, however, its focus on kineticism and constant rhythms as a means