Drawn Together Review: Attractive Leads, Predictable Machinery
The most revealing joke in Drawn Together may be one the film barely seems to recognize as a joke. Marfil...
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Anna Biller has made a film in which nearly everything looks artificial except the cruelty. The castles resemble studio castles, the armor gleams with improbable cleanliness, faces are lit as though every medieval bedroom came equipped with a Hollywood lighting crew, and the colors announce themselves before the characters do. Then Edward murders the father of the woman he wants to marry. The joke is obvious. The implications are less tidy. The Face of Horror returns Biller to feature filmmaking a decade after The Love Witch, this time transplanting the Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan into a medieval England imagined...

Gavin has already performed the culturally approved version of queer escape before grief sends him back to Missouri. He left for Chicago, built a life around friends and a drag-show community, and learned to treat home as somewhere that could safely remain behind him. Then his father dies. The return should activate a familiar American movie grammar: the liberated city self confronting the small town that made liberation necessary. Trash Mountain keeps setting up that story and then quietly refusing to deliver it. That refusal gives Kris Rey’s film its most interesting quality, even when the surrounding structure feels inherited...

The strangest burden in Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors is not the marble itself. It is the knowledge of what that marble will become. Men drag it through jungle paths, guard it from thieves, collapse under the work, and continue because a church must rise where Padre Enciso has decided a church belongs. Lav Diaz makes that future structure feel present long before we see its walls. Every slab carries the weight of a building that will survive the people forced to serve it. Set in the Philippines in 1617, the film places colonialism inside ordinary acts of obedience. Enciso,...

Léo Saragossi spends much of his unexpected week in Paris asking people to explain his own past to him. The arrangement is clever because it turns memory into a contested narrative rather than a reliable account. It is also the source of nearly every problem Nicolas Pariser eventually creates for himself. Once each reunion starts carrying exposition, social diagnosis, and moral reassessment at the same time, conversation stops feeling like discovery and starts resembling testimony entered into evidence. Léo is nearing 50 when the death of the Italian father he barely knew interrupts an already stalled life. His writing career...

A detective who cannot trust his own perception presents a fairly obvious problem for a crime story. Sabu finds the better problem hiding behind it: what happens when everyone around that detective trusts him too much. In Arrested Memory, Lee’s failing memory interrupts an investigation while corrupting the meaning of everything he does. A blank stare looks like strategy. Wandering away with ransom money looks like betrayal. Confusion becomes evidence because the people watching him are determined to impose intention on behavior that has none. The cruel joke begins with genuine trauma. Lee, played by Ethan Juan, is leading a...

The most revealing joke in Drawn Together may be one the film barely seems to recognize as a joke. Marfil Cortés and her bodyguard Sebastián go to the cinema and watch The Bodyguard, placing Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner directly inside a Spanish romantic thriller that has already borrowed their basic arrangement. The reference is cheeky, certainly, but it also gives away the film’s larger problem. Óscar Pedraza’s adaptation understands the international language of the bodyguard romance perfectly. What it struggles to supply is a reason for this particular version to exist beyond the familiarity of that language. The route...
The most revealing joke in Drawn Together may be one the film barely seems to recognize as a joke. Marfil...
Read moreDetailsA relationship that has lasted ten years should have accumulated enough history to survive one bad stretch. A Love Other...
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Read moreDetailsNightsleeper is trading its hijacked overnight train for a hijacked ferry. The BBC's real-time thriller has cast Colin Morgan, Madeleine Mantock and Christian Cooke to lead its second series, which relocates the action to a Belfast-to-Liverpool passenger crossing under threat from a cyberattack. Filming is already underway in Belfast. The...
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Read moreAnna Biller has made a film in which nearly everything looks artificial except the cruelty. The castles resemble studio castles, the armor gleams with improbable cleanliness, faces are lit as...
Gavin has already performed the culturally approved version of queer escape before grief sends him back to Missouri. He left for Chicago, built a life around friends and a drag-show...
The strangest burden in Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors is not the marble itself. It is the knowledge of what that marble will become. Men drag it through jungle paths,...
Léo Saragossi spends much of his unexpected week in Paris asking people to explain his own past to him. The arrangement is clever because it turns memory into a contested...
Nightsleeper is trading its hijacked overnight train for a hijacked ferry. The BBC's real-time thriller has cast Colin Morgan, Madeleine Mantock and Christian Cooke to lead its second series, which...
Maddie Evans, best known for her role as Dyana in HBO's House of the Dragon, will headline a new British horror feature rooted in one of England's most infamous historical...
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