Step Printed Review

With The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson captures chaos with paradoxical precision. It’s a marvelous achievement where the film manages to be freewheeling, anarchic and delightfully messy, all while staying immaculately controlled. Though the primary strength is in its comedy, this aforementioned dichotomy is where resonance lays: order is mapped onto disorder to reckon with a corrupt world, and to mirror a quest for control amongst chaos.

The narrative is unwieldy yet precisely segmented. The immaculate mise en…

From StepPrinted.com

For all its claims of authenticity, Warfare is deeply deceptive. It starts by misleading you, a claim is put forward that ‘this film only uses their memories’ (their being the soldiers depicted therein). On a number of levels, this is profoundly untrue but the way it is untrue is deeply revealing about the film itself. 

Let’s start out linguistically, the key offenders are the determiner, ‘this’, the adverb, ‘only’ and the verb ‘uses’. The determiner is picked out…

Incredibly rote stuff of black sheep returns and family holiday gone wrong. You can map it out from the start and the way it slots into place isn’t very satisfying, just ploddingly inevitable. 

The interesting touch is family playing family, which makes the credits intriguing but isn’t additive to the film. There’s certainly some natural chemistry gained but it’s really a touch hampered by this as existing, off camera relationships are over relied on to the extent there’s not much…

Soren Kirkergaard wrote that 'life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards'. Aftersun is an impressionistic portrait of this truism, an intricate web of framing devices that comes across as effortless.

In fact, describing Aftersun makes it sound so much more complicated than it is. The film presents three narrative perspectives, all adopting the lens of Sophie (Frankie Corio), the daughter of Calum (Paul Mescal) (the father and daughter relationship that the film entirely revolves around).…

I like to think that if this was released now, it would be torn apart by audiences, rather than just a few critics. I like to think it would be roundly rejected and would inspire frequent think pieces that were also full of recommendations of what you should watch instead.

But then I Green Book won best picture and that this film’s overt popularity is because it gives the people what they want. It gives them the stereotype of…