Fresh Fork

  enre: Comedy; Action; Romance. Director: Richard Linklater Writers: Richard Linklater & Glen Powell Starring: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio & Retta Audiences who go watch it expecting a grand cinematic experience might feel it as a bit of a letdown, but if they're open to embrace  Hit Man 's small scaled filmmaking with a spicy (and quite funny) touch, then they will have one of the most rewarding time at the movies of the last couple of years.  Hit Man  is a delicious film, not perfect, but quite audience-friendly. It's pretty mainstream, but it's pretty good also! Richard Linklater is better known for audience-friendly movies like  Dazed and Confused  (1993) or  School of Rock  (2003), but also for some quite prestigious titles like the  Before  trilogy,  Tape  (2001) or  Boyhood  (2014). With  Hit Man , Linklater seems to find the perfect combo between his two "categories" of works of his ...

  IMMACULATE A tepid piece of religious horror,  Immaculate  has a great premise, but it never actually takes advantage of it at its full. It gets lost when it tries to criticize the patriarchy and the rigid religious norms in an attempt to make for a necessary commentary about The Curch. Still, it offers a fine performance from Sydney Sweeney, who goes higher than what we have already seen from her in  Euphoria  TV series and  Anyone But You  - she might not reach brilliance here, but she does make for a great scream queen (specially in the last scene).  Promising, but not as good as it could be. It demanded more visual/graphic horror in order to be terrifying and there are some plot holes in this narrative. Watchable, but underwhelming. RATING:  4,5/10 LOVE LIES BLEEDING It starts as a conventional girl meets girl in a weird context, but then things catch fire and the characters start to evolve - and that's when the movie really grips you....

  THE ZONE OF INTEREST It's not a movie that grabs you by the heart, but by the mind. There's two movies here: the one you watch and the one you can hear. It plays like a documentary feature in a way that you simply watch the everyday's lives of a German family whose patriarch is charged with the management of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The almost fairy-tale like life of the family hosting parties and taking care of a beautiful garden and a very confortable home contrasts with the horrific sounds of something you cannot see but you know it's coming from the other side of the wall that separates the family from the people in the concentration camp. Mica Levi's score will be haunting you for days, as it will the sound work. In the cinematography department, the camera angles create a detachment from the characters, making the audience a simple viewer, like you are watching a reality show. Still, it's a satire you can relate with multiple things right n...

  ast sunday, the Oscars took place in a ceremony with no big surprises, no big thrills and no huge iconic moments... but it got some all timers as winners:   Cillian Murphy 's win for   Oppenheimer  still amazes me (such an internal and subtle performance getting the gold),   The Zone of Interest   in Best Sound (chilling and perfectly balanced work),   Poor Things  in Best Costume Design and Best Production Design and   The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar   for Best Live Action Short Film (marking   Wes Anderson 's first Oscar win of his career). On the other hand, I felt sad for   Lily Gladstone   not winning Best Actress for   Killers of the Flower Moon  (such a soulful devastating performance), but   Emma Stone   was also a very worthy winner for playing the charismatic Bella Baxter in   Poor Things . In a night  Oppenheimer  won big (and its Summer "nemesis"  Barbie  only t...

  Javier Bardem, Florence Pugh, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, Souheila Yacoub, Christopher Walken, Stellan Skarsgård,  Charlotte Rampling  and  Léa Seydoux Dune  (2021) was a very good movie, which featured fantastic visual and technical aspects - a movie meant to be admired rather than fully lived mostly because of the "half plotline" from the source material - but then you understand it was all about setting the plot foundations for the cinematic spectacle of  Dune: Part Two . It's a movie that will please both fans and non-fans of the first film. In fact, I'm grateful I live in the same time it was made because it allowed me to experience it on a theatre. I was immersed, astonished and utterly marveled with this one! Dune: Part Two  starts at the exact same place and time where it left us in 2021's film and it wastes no time presenting context to the audience. In fact,  Part Two  is way more narrative-driven, but it never feels overwhel...

  Yorgos Lanthimos has made some of the most weird and brilliant (and unconventional) comedies of the last decade ( The Lobster   and  The Favourite ), but he reaches his peak as one of the greatest cinematic geniuses with Poor Things - a social comment on the role of women and their objectification and the search for liberation disguised as a comedic journey of an incredible woman connecting with the world. In fact,   Poor Things   is a lot of things, but it manages to be always entertaining, funny and even tragic sometimes. It's the best 2023 film I've seen! The movie starts by presenting us a woman who we later discover to be named Bella, who was brough back to life by a scientist, Dr. Godwin Baxter, who was a product of his father's experiments himself. Bella starts developing as a child trapped in a full-grown woman body and Dr. Baxter hires Max McCandles to observe and report the many developments and discoveries of Bella. These men develop a protecting ap...

  enice International Film Festival has always been one of the most prestigious cinematic events of the year, but it has become the very first stop for the pre-awards season. Ever since 2017, when Del Toro's  The Shape of Water  won the Golden Lion for Best Film that the festival's top prize winner has been a major Oscar player: 2018's   Roma , 2019's   Joker   and 2020's   Nomadland   ended-up getting a Best Picture nom (with the last one winning); 2021's  The Happening  didn't get major award love in the US (mostly because it didn't get a major distributor able to handle an awards campaign); and 2022's   All the Beauty and the Bloodshed   ended-up nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. So... the Jury for the main competition named  Yorgos Lanthimos '  Poor Things  the Best Film of the festival, while Hamaguchi's  Evil Does Not Exist  (the director of  Drive My Car ) took ho...