This one’s been a long time coming. It’s tricky trying not to lay too much import on a piece of art that holds such behemoth historical, political, and creative stature when you’ve heard reams of lore, praise, and lines of questioning—but for not much of a reason, just haven’t seen it. When it’s the kind of thing your parents would have sat you down for sometime when you were starting to develop your taste, or that you and a friend…
Terrifying in the most essential use of the word, literally breathtaking, and basely, perversely, hysterically riveting. Good god. Hooper sets it up simply as can be with this perfect balance of a recognizably-motivated yet fundamentally anonymous ragtag group of friends on a trip to see an old homestead; he lures you past the starting signs of warning to follow along with them to a house shadowed by generations before them, and onward again into these hypnotic, searingly lit pastoral sequences…
Jamming. Finding community. iring. Loving. Challenging. Loathing. Discovering authenticity. It’s all in the way they look at each other.
I’ve been inclined to be cynical about this for months, but then I ed James Mangold really is the GOAT of pitching an atmospheric biopic down the middle of the plate.
A defiant, grandiose epic poem driving a thorny, doubtfully hopeful, witheringly existential stake into the reverence of nation-building, theocracy, capital power, institutional artistry, and phallic imperial control preying upon popping veins and open wounds of cultural identity—further, into American nationalists and Christians, fetishizing historic annihilation and grief of Jewish people, manipulating their work, bodies, and artistry. It’s weaving a fraught and complicated story of the Hungarian-born László Tóth and his family, stuck between many hard rocks and many hard places. …
You think I’m gonna let you out of my sight again, huh? You stay with me now, younger brother. Now go. My place.
In hopes to articulate my feelings with balance and acknowledge my bias, this is a movie that endures and resonates with me cosmically due in large part to the time and place I first saw it. It’s hard to separate what it meant—and always will mean—for it to be the last film I saw with my brother…
Artistry as a pipe-dream, metric-breaking fantasia and melting pot of creative mediums, philosophy, history, styles, drama, humor, and culture.
It’s an insatiable vision of unwieldy, ostentatious, absurd, and beautiful theatrics where the edges of grandiose classicism and history plays meet digital expressionism; the existential sci-fi opera meets metropolitan power-drama, meets agitprop montage and alienation effect; impressions of sculpture, architecture, and iconography meet historical archetypes and actors’ personas; and the loftiest of ideals meet each other, as do the most vile,…
