To say The Menu is a dark comedy is understating the issue. This is BLACK comedy, as dark as it gets. Voldemort doesn’t hold a candle to Ralph Fiennes’ Julian Slowik. Imagine crossing The Bear with Eating Raoul, and you might get a vague idea of what this film is up to.
Ani (diminutive of Anora, the titular character, played by Mikey Madison) works in a strip club, pole dancing and taking customers to back rooms for a friendly lap dance. She sometimes does a bit of escort service on the side. She is pretty, and young enough to not have become resigned to her lot in life. She makes good money, enough to live in New York City.
Because she speaks some Russian, management assigns her to “Vanya,” (Mark Eydelshteyn). Vanya is what Steve Martin might characterize as “a wild and crazy guy” – perpetually high, living life as one long party. They have a pleasantly blurry good time together, and when he next pops into the club, he asks for her by name.
The first thing to know about The Electric State is that the whole thing is daft as tits on a tank. It has the same blend of deadly seriousness and utter lunacy that one finds in, say, Who Killed Roger Rabbit?
If Inside Out was a great portrayal of the hidden mind of a child, Inside Out 2 surpasses it with the far more intricate and complex machinations of the mind of a female adolescent. It’s easy for an adult to dismiss the concerns of childhood as shallow and even trivial, but the tsunami of emotion and confusion that comes with early teenage years is something even adults shy away from.
I didn’t do a lot of reviews this past year. Fifty three in all. It was an election year and I write mostly about politics, and I have a backlog going into 2025. Also, if I think something is rubbish, I’m very unlikely to review it. And there was a fair old bit of rubbish that came out last year.
Written and directed by Garth Jennings Produced by Chris Meledandri & Janet Healy The animation was created entirely in France by Illumination Mac Guff.[ Starring Matthew McConaughey Reese Witherspoon Seth MacFarlane Scarlett Johansson John C. Reilly Taron Egerton Tori Kelly Cinematography Guylo Homsy Edited by Gregory Perler Music by Joby Talbot Production companies Universal Pictures …
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Directed by Tim Burton Screenplay by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar Story by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, Seth Grahame-Smith Based on Characters by Michael McDowell, Larry Wilson Produced by Marc Toberoff, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Tommy Harper, Tim Burton Starring Michael Keaton Winona Ryder Catherine O’Hara Justin Theroux Monica Bellucci Jenna Ortega Willem Dafoe …
Wolfs Written and Directed by Jon Watts Produced by George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Dianne McGunigle, Jon Watts Starring George Clooney Brad Pitt Amy Ryan Austin Abrams Poorna Jagannathan Cinematography Larkin Seiple Edited by Andrew Weisblum Music by Theodore Shapiro Production companies Apple Studios, Plan B Entertainment, Smokehouse Pictures Distributed …
Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant Directed by Ariane Louis-Seize Written by Ariane Louis-Seize, Christine Doyon Produced by Jeanne-Marie Poulain, Line Sander Egede Starring Sara Montpetit Félix-Antoine Bénard Steve Laplante Sophie Cadieux Noémie O’Farrell Marie Brassard Patrick Hivon Marc Beaupré Cinematography Shawn Pavlin Edited by Stéphane Lafleur Music by Pierre-Philippe Côté Production company Art et Essai …
A Year in review: a review of 2023 2023 was another great year for television. Among other great shows we watched (and I reviewed) this year were Gen V (outrageous spin-off of The Boys), One Piece (excellent live-action version of a rather dumb anime), a new BBC remake of War of the Worlds, an engaging …