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...

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...

Jacob Elordi gives nothing short of a mesmerizing performance * this review is spoiler free, though it mentions a lot about Frankenstein in all its forms*   Sometimes a movie is good because it is innovative, either within narrative, craft or form, it functions in a way never before done. Sometimes the flowers a film receives come because it gives us some new perspective, maybe even falling into that award season trap of “importance,” causing the praise to then flow forth of necessity. Even further some films are good seemingly simply because they can’t help it, an occurrence usually thanks to some alchemy of both previous considerations, a mixture of theme, creator and function that proves too intoxicating, too “great,” to receive anything but the utmost respect. Within all of these, rather invented, designations, there are then even further those pictures which are great for some ethereal quality within their frames, one almost difficult to name or place. Films where the greatnes...

*I openly spoil the ending of Alien:Earth season 1 as well as several more of the Alien films here. A short summary of my thoughts on the season without spoilers is that I think it's pretty good. It goes in new directions while homaging the long running film series in a way that was far less grating than Alien: Romulus last year (even if I still enjoy that particular film). I remain resolute in my feeling that its a generally bad idea to take things that are movies and make tv-shows out of them, even I think this one by and large works. *          Perhaps because AI then did not exist, nor does it really exist now in the way they thought it would, the conception that AI could teach us about the human soul is almost equally prolific a science fiction trope as its malicious world destroying counterpart. For every Terminator, Hal 9000, and human battery farm, there is a reformed T-800, Haley Joel Osment, and a little girl stuck in a train station (that of cour...

Emma Stone and Deirdre O'Connell spiraling into conspiracy *while this essay does not contain any overt spoilers to the film, it would likely be understood better and appreciated further after viewing* The western has always been about space. The spaces between settlements, between cultures, between familial divides. The vastness of the American west served as the perfect backdrop for valorizing the violent men of the new nation’s mythology, yet in the lens of certain filmmakers, it also served as a defaultly alienating space. As a swallowing hole of equally great beauty and suffocation. This, often as subtext, is certainly present in the films of John Ford though it becomes more overt in newer films like Meek’s Cutoff from Kelly Reichardt and now with Ari Aster’s truly modern western Eddington. The film divorces the western’s traditional devotion to the past and plants its feet firmly in the volatile soil of May 2020, a date that should cause at the very least a shudder down the s...