the kino park

     it should be obvious that a film with this much Michael B. Jordan cannot be anything but an essential film. *this is a spoiler filled deep dive into Sinners as well as Ryan Coogler's career thus far*      The split personality, a long held literary and cinematic trope, is almost as prolific as its inverse, the cinematic twin played by a single actor, yet, traditionally, each serve distinct and separate purposes. Both of these have mined ample horror as well as metaphorical consideration into the nature of the soul, though the cinematic twin is often a performance tour de force, even verging on stunt casting, while the split personality is almost exclusively reserved for “madness.” In Ryan Coogler’s Sinners , one of two semi-recent twin centered releases (the other Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 , which utilizes its twins for humanist metaphor and political critique), these dueling visual motifs converge, at the very least thematically. Doubling his prefe...

a stunning moment in Chloe Zhao's Hamnet *I don't spoil either film here besides the loose concept that sad things happen in both movies.* Tragedy in a film is something easily approached, but delicately, if not even precariously, executed. Tightrope walking upon the razor thin margin of error for a film to effectively employ a tragic turn of plot all too easily slides into melodrama at best and outright exploitation at worst. Some films and stories have handily approached this by leaning into the knee jerk reactions of its potential, like Titanic for example, a film which takes tragedy as the very focal point of its exploration. Others, like adaptations of Shakespeare, though he very well might have invented the western world's approach to dramatic tragedy, center the film around inherent flaws within its characters and thereby mine tragedy via humanistic study. One of the most difficult tricks to pull is to maintain both the weight of tragedy and a nuanced and grounded co...

Emma Stone is our greatest actor * loose allusions to the film's conclusion, but otherwise no spoilers* Provocation. In a direct inverse, though certainly of a similar kind, to this year’s excellent Eddington, even sharing an Ari Aster between them, comes the latest Emma Stone/Jesse Plemmons/Yorgos Lanthimos hitter Bugonia , and like 2024's Kinds of Kindness , it is a movie of deferred provocation. Where Eddington elected for an overt political approach, Bugonia shows us a world certainly colored in those delusions, strifes and oppressions, but one that falls far less one for one. There are metaphors and images here ripe for political dissemination, yet thanks largely to Lanthimos’ capable, ever devious, hand, never is one single topic permitted to overpower the material. While a film featuring a Green Day centered torture scene could probably never truly be called subtle, the resulting film is one providing a satirical and explosive exploration of a world flattening itself, a...