Movies
Lanthimos goes all-in and delivers his first full-on masterpiece. Poor Things is a film bustling with creativity, dripping with excess, and referencing so many styles and stories that it's almost impossible to see it as a singular work. And yet it feels polished and complete. It's Frankenstein by the way of The Handmaiden, peppered with Wes Anderson influences and flashes of Perfume. It took Lanthimos a while to develop his signature style in something I could wholeheartedly appreciate, but Poor Things is 100% that film. A very cool surprise.
Bold and frivolous take on the classic costume drama. It's a bit surprising, considering Lanthimos' earlier films, but he managed to turn this into a rather fun and extravagant affair that never ran out of steam. The visual trickery gets a little repetitive maybe, but that's hardly a negative for a genre that is otherwise quite stuffy and stagnant.
Venice 70: Future Reloaded
I'm a big fan of anthologies, and this project sounded very promising on paper. Seventy renowned directors give their vision on the future of cinema. With just one minute per short, there isn't much time to make a point, but it's disheartening to see how few of them even managed to stick to the topic. The saddest part was that many of the short didn't even deal with the future, but openly referred to or praised the medium's past. There's also a lot of doom and gloom, with some very basic visions of people not caring enough about arthouse cinema, or playing movies on their phones. Your typical old-man-yelling-at-cloud stuff. There is only a small selection of directors who seem to have understood the brief, and they struggle to make the most of their limited runtime. What remains is a complete mess, with most shorts looking like they were made on people's afternoon off, and hardly anything that stands out. A disappointment.Read all