Thoughts on The Guilty (Den skyldige 2018)

The Danish real-time single-set thriller The Guilty (Den skyldige 2018), debut feature of writer-director Gustav Möller, is a trip and a half. Asger (Jakob Cedergren) is relegated to emergency response operator while a case he’s entangled in goes through the courts. He doesn’t like it, but he plays nice. Then he gets a call from Iben (Jessica Dinage), who says she’s been kidnapped in a van. Despite everyone telling him to just do his job, Asger feels responsible for getting this woman safely back to her two young children, and his personal overinvolvement proves to be his downfall.

Thoughts on Chiwawa (Chiwawa-chan / チワワちゃん 2019)

In Chiwawa (Chiwawa-chan / チワワちゃん 2019), a group of friends get their hands on a truckload of money, burn through it in three days, and drift out of each other’s lives. Then, we learn in the opening scene, Chiwawa (Shiori Yoshida), the new friend they met that very night who spearheaded the dumbest robbery in cinema history, winds up dead, her body parts tossed into the sea. To counter the moralistic news reports focusing on Chiwawa’s promiscuity and party lifestyle, Miki (Mugi Kadowaka) canvasses their shared group of friends for their memories of her—despite the fact that Chiwawa stole her boyfriend, Yoshida (Ryô Narita), who turns out to be a playboy. We thus get Citizen Kane (1941), complete with nostalgia for lost youthful innocence, in the non-moralistic sense.

Thoughts on Vox Lux (2018)

I have a running theory about Rachel McAdams and Natalie Portman. I think the former is more telegenic when expressing emotions such as joy, exuberance, mirth, while the latter is favored by the camera for anxiety, ambivalence, despair. Vox Lux, Brady Corbet’s second feature as director, stars Portman and only strengthens this impression. But even in Celeste’s (Portman) on-the-edge neurosis, Portman still isn’t the perfect fit for the character’s exuberance.

Breaking Down Conceptual Binaries: Maborosi (Maboroshi no Hikari / 幻の光 1995)

Grief is a many-faceted thing. I’ve often felt that mainstream portrayals of grief treat it like an illness to be gotten over, rather than what it really is: a new state of being. It becomes an indelible part of one’s life, not necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, just another thing. (The explosion of the good/bad experience binary is one of the groundbreaking aspects of Inside Out (2015).) It’s one of my biggest issues with First Man (2018) and, in retrospect, Manchester by the Sea (2016). Maborosi (Maboroshi no Hikari / 幻の光 1995), the Ozu-tinged fiction feature debut of current arthouse darling Hirokazu Kore-eda, is a detailed and deeply empathetic portrayal of one woman carried along by the passage of time, bringing her grief with her.

The Rise of the Videogame Aesthetic in Cinema (Critics at Large)

I just published a piece at Critics at Large on Aquaman (2018), Serenity (2019), and the videogame aesthetic in cinema. Check it out here!