Isherwood

It’s an audio-visually over-stylized, soft-spoken, yet more than eloquent fresco about the dark side of the eternal city that manages a quantum of characters, unprecedented violence, and metaphorical parables. Some of the threads could still use an extra knot at the end, but it is still an intense and exhausting viewing experience in the best sense.

This is a filmed handbook for aspiring horror filmmakers. Øvredal sticks to tradition like a pathologist to a scalpel. He knows where the line between light and shadow lies, and at the same time he has a clear idea that even if you routinely cut into corpses for a couple of decades, you're still a person with a distinctive character at your core. We get all this for at least the first hour. The final twenty minutes are very clumsy, both in the denouement and in the presentation, where I would have cut down on the literalness of the images and the biblical quotations. It was still fairly decent, though.

A pure post-western that doesn't remember the old days fondly, but laments the misery of the present, which doesn't favor cowboys. It’s a wistful tale from the borderlands that reigns in its casting and pure direction. However, the theatrical standing on the porch with a beer in your hand and philosophy on your lips is perhaps too much at times.

This is a caricature of everything, including the craft of filmmaking.

An astral trip to a dimension where the protagonists lack sympathy and the creative process lacks logic. I’m actually bothered by the new-age clowning with angels and autistic yoga aesthetics a little less than the fact that the narrative is based on shaky direction, which can't handle tension and layers everything into an initially uninteresting and ridiculous whole. It has such a shaky foundation that you almost miss the point and by the final geyser, you feel ashamed of the filmmakers.

What Jarmusch has given me so far mostly resonated with me some more, yet Paterson, with all due respect to Driver's unique performance, doesn't have. After a few days, all I can recall is the likable hipster pose, which, though I resisted the idea tooth and nail at the sight of happy bearded men in leggings and Converse shoes after leaving the movie theater, is unfortunately just over the edge of being more pop than art.

I'm not denying that it has the intrinsic energy and impressive technical processing, but I'm not willing to deal with the fact that the musical interludes actually hurt it (the second half, which more or less gets by without them, is much better than the first). In addition, the lavish kitsch framing the story of the supposedly naive but in many ways self-centered narcissists is actually annoying. What I want from Chazelle is any genre film where the music will be a means, not an end. Given his age, he has unique skills.

It’s no fan service and it goes hard toward even the most welcoming viewer. It’s a non-Hollywood adaptation that mercilessly flushed over a hundred million and had no shame in doing so. It’s visually captivating bliss that tests the projectionists and the limits of how much the viewer is willing to accept the creative rules.

Leaving aside Wyler's version, the beloved film of the epic sandal genre, you're left with prefabricated agitprop about the legacy of Nazareth's most famous carpenter, with Kazakhstan's most famous cultural export currently cataloging it with a CGI generator whose algorithm someone forgot to turn off for the visuals of a full-screen TV series, so you're just waiting for M.F. to explain it all to you at the end, and this time he doesn't (oops, spoiler).

In order to be fully satisfied, it would have needed better supervision and a more capable implementer who can see beyond the minute horizon of a TV commercial. That Netflix doesn't let a vigorous dramaturgist and an agile editor out of the cage is thus worth considering. I'm a little sad that I can’t give it at least 60%, but the more the runtime moves toward two hours, the more I was gnawing at my remote with boredom.