Matt Cipolla

Céline Devaux’s hyperactive rom-com has enough creativity and engagement to distract from its unevenness.
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
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“Superficiality is for another generation,” Jeanne Mayer (Blanche Gardin) screams to herself. Instead, her anxieties say it to her, visualized through sinuous, sketchy animation; they demand a lot. She ca...

Welcome to AdirondACTS Theater Camp in gorgeous upstate New York. Led by founder Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris), the kids, a menagerie of the precocious and hyperactive, are about to put on a production of Bye Bye Birdie. The stage lights are on and––oh, wait. Never mind. Joan has just suffered a seizure from the strobing, so she’s in the hospital. Apparently the “documentary” filmmakers have only been on location for a day. Alas, we only know that because a title card tells us. We don’t really ...

Gregg Araki dissects how identity turns to apathy in his hyper-stylized second part of the Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy.
Every month, The Spool chooses to highlight a filmmaker whose works have made a distinct mark on the cinematic landscape.
Coinciding with the release of a new 4K restoration of The Doom Generation, we’ve decided to turn our eyes this Pride Month on Gregg Araki’s oeuvre. In so doing, we hope to shine a light on one of the New Queer Cinema’s boldest, most radical voices.
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Manuela Martelli explores the ripple effects of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in her first film, a sly, evasive genre mashup.
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With a travel book in her hands and a cigarette in her fingers, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim) deliberates what shade of paint she’d like for her walls. She wants it like a sunset but not too pink. Maybe a bit blue. After all, it’s not like she goes outside too often. Even her commutes, now to her Las Cruces beach house, are isolated. It’s 1976 in Chile, three ...

Eliza Scanlen elevates her role as a lapsing fundamentalist in a drama that ends up too literal to stick out.
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Jem Starling’s (Eliza Scanlen) wardrobe is too much for the Kentucky heat. Yet others say her bra is still too visible. She tries to praise the Lord through dance with attempts progressive yet accessible to her church. Still, her peers claim the music she picks is too aggressive. Her instructor, Misty (Jessamine Burgum), gently scolds her individuality in class. Meanwhile, ...

Matt Cipolla (The Spool, The Film Stage) joins us this week for Brady Corbet’s Twenty-First Century Portrait with Vox Lux, Corbet’s response to America in the perspective of a pop star after he had an impressive run in the 2010s as an actor. Together, we look at our memories of iconic American moments of the 00s, imaginative biopics, and how the movie was neglected in 2018.

With almost twenty-seven years under its belt and now a sixth installment to its name, the Scream movies have shifted focus yet again. The series once about its leads’ attempts to extricate themselves from whatever pop-culture refraction others, killer or not, forced upon them is no more. The funhouse of previous entries is no longer the obstacle but the rule. Films are facile – “episodic,” even, as Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) declares – but the change isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s simply...

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.
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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...