Matt Cipolla

Gaspar Noé serves up another slice of cinematic provocation, but this time feels a bit too self-indulgent in its supernatural metaness.
“It’s not politics. It’s poetry!” one of the many voices screams approximately half an hour into Lux Aeterna (stylized, of course, as Lux Æterna). With that line, Gaspar Noé’s 51-minute movie—now available on digital three years after its 2019 Cannes Film Festival premiere—reaches the self-awareness at which it often paws. That opener is partly a joke in and ...

Anton Corbijn’s biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis remains a tactful, fearfully accurate depiction of life while suicidal.
I am but a bundle of impulses. Whatever I feel I think; much of what I think I do. But I’m so afraid I’ll do what I feel.
There is no thought when the line between body and mind annihilates itself. What once was thought is now process. By its side is performance, expression’s tenebrous complement. I don’t know which is which at times, my consciousness a tad flatter,...

Put on your spandex, avoid the sangria and stay out of the electrical closet because this week's "underrated or underseen" entry is Gaspar Noé's Climax (2019).
Joining us on this (acid) trip is writer Matt Cipolla, who brings a wealth of Noé knowledge, as well as nihilist philosophy like E. M. Cioran's aphorisms.
We discuss Noé as a troll and why the film is (or isn't?) political and racist, as well as the unorthodox & collaborative production, child murder and more than a few drug stories.
P...

There’s something dispiriting about the latest Scream. It’s an uncanny sort, though, the kind that makes its outcome even harder to swallow. The film’s shortcomings come short of producing an abject failure. The attempts at taking risks, as misguided as the execution itself can be, confound as much as they disappoint. Of course, a change in course for one of the best—if not the best—horror franchises is to be expected. Scream 4 underperformed at the box office in 2011. Hopes for a new trilogy...

From Annette to Zola, we break down the best movies of the year.
This time last year, the film industry was positively besotten with the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit every home and industry across the world but affected moviemaking (and releasing) in unique ways. Those effects rippled through into 2021, leading to an absolute glut of films, with more and more ways to access them: Big 2020 blockbusters were delayed to the following year, still others were released day-and-d...

The auteur’s update of the 1946 novel is a film noir steeped in too much of his own romanticism.
Back in 1998, Gus Van Sant released his remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It wasn’t a good movie, but it provided two decent critical talking points. Firstly, was it actually a remake, or was it another adaptation of Robert Bloch’s novel? Given that Van Sant’s film was a shot-for-shot recreation of its 1960 predecessor save for two or three differences, it was a rarity in that, given its contex...

Upon sitting down to write about House of Gucci, I thought I’d open with a quote. There had to have been some line, however peripheral, that stuck. That wasn’t the case. How about a moment that encapsulates its 157 minutes? It has the components necessary to dive into its artifice, at least in theory. There’s the grandeur, and there are the more hyperbolic aspects that match whatever people loosely toss the term “camp” at. Alas, nothing on that front dug its heels into me either. Instead all ...

Robert Greene’s documentary centers the pain of six men haunted by child sex abuse, but struggles to see past their trauma.
The very idea of reviewing something like Procession is a task in and of itself. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult; it’s that it runs the risk of coming off less as reviewing a film than reviewing people and their realities. Am I, myself a rape survivor, to laud the subjects’ humanity that propels Robert Greene’s documentary? Of course.
But am I, a critic, to neg...

Joanna Hogg continues the quietly moving story of a young woman’s recovery from abuse and finding solace in art.
With her abuser out of her life, one would think it’d be easier for Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) to move from day to day. In some ways, it is; she’s no longer directly in the clutches of Anthony’s (Tom Burke) patterns of insults, flattery, and disposal. He’s now dead as a result of his drug addiction. She, however, still lives with his memory. She discusses him with her psychologist...

Edgar Wright’s Giallo homage wants to say something about feminism but is too frothy and oversimplified.
Has any other director in recent years had as frustrating a creative decline as Edgar Wright? Discounting his feature debut—the 1995, no-budget A Fistful of Fingers—his streak was white-hot. Two series of Spaced both developed and prefaced his earnest eye for nerd culture, leading up to what would become his Cornetto Trilogy. His work was so loving, so finely tuned, and, especially in the ...

Where does one even begin with Halloween Kills? Is it paramount to speak of its content, which achieves the impossible of being so stretched out that it couldn’t feel more bloated? Or perhaps it’s important to focus on its structure, but that would assume there actually is one. Even attempting to approach it thematically is too much of a non-issue—any ideas it juggles never cohere. Halloween Kills seems to stem from thoughts of the system failing the innocent. That doesn’t work, however, when...

Even as it makes bold steps toward the future, Daniel Craig’s swan song as 007 feels like a frustrating hodgepodge of the films that came before it.
To speak of No Time to Die is to speak of what came before it. Of course, that sounds obvious in theory; the Daniel Craig era of 007 comes to an end here. They lightly tied into each other until Spectre drunkenly tried and failed at deepening the mythology. While the quality of the films varied, at least they were all distinct. It’s been fifteen ...

Annie Clark and Carrie Brownstein play with the fuzzy lines between artistic identity and celebrity in ways that both entertain and befuddle.
In one of The Nowhere Inn’s several recurring clips, Carrie Brownstein confides in her best friend. She says that she wants to do bigger things. She declares herself as being stuck in a rut creatively and, acquiescing to the possibility that only those closest to her truly get something out of her work. As for the friend in question, she’s Annie Clark—t...

Clint Eastwood’s latest boasts a strong central performance in a grand step up from his recent works despite its rocky script.
The country soundtrack kicks in. The plain, honey-coated lens flairs coat the screen. A truck parks and out steps Mike Milo (Clint Eastwood), met with the distance of his once-good friend Howard (Dwight Yoakam) who, like a soda machine someone’s kicked loose, dispenses copious exposition about Mike’s past. The man was a great rodeo rider before dabbling in pills and d...

Nia DaCosta’s long-awaited horror sequel uses its unorthodox approaches to make for an unspooling nightmare that’s hard to shake.
As sparse as it is specific, Nia DaCosta’s Candyman feels like falling into a nightmare. It has the context, but the context feels increasingly shifted. It has the gravity, but the weight at hand seems to fall onto its audience in slow motion. It has a sense of remove but also a sense of intimacy, and as the picture develops, those schisms manage to lean into one a...