A professional assassin who lives by the ancient code of the samurai finds himself targeted by his Mafia bosses. Ghost Dog, a rare venture into genre films for Jim Jarmusch, allows the writer-director to frequently quote, reference, and build upon many classics in his own quirkily deadpan, deceptively honest way. Dog's unglamorous community of gangsters is reminiscent of John Cassavetes' hoods and lowlifes in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but—this being Jarmusch—an understated absurdist wit frequently underlies the drama.
Director David Lynch's film tells of Joseph Merrick, whose terrible deformities to head, limbs, and skin led to him being called the Elephant Man. It begins with Merrick's nightmare of his mother being attacked by elephants—supposedly the cause of Merrick's condition—in smeary, scary, surreal images as disturbing as those from Lynch's earlier fatherhood paranoia party film, Eraserhead.
At first glance, Marriage Story seems like six (or so) characters in search of a Woody Allen film. But it soon settles into writer-director Noah Baumbach's own rhythm and whine as two self-absorbed, narcissistic artistic personalities move toward a break-up and into the clutches of divorce lawyers.
Around 1890, two lighthouse keepers—isolated on a remote New England island with just gulls, each other, and a large supply of liquor for company—begin to gradually lose their sense of reality, civility, and eventually their sanity in an atmospheric concoction not conveyed this intensely since The Shining. It all makes for a great (if grueling) two-handed drama.
Uncut Gems, like its lead character, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), is challenging. A brash, lying, motor-mouthed, but charming hustler trading in precious gems and jewelry from a store he owns in Manhattan's Diamond District, Howard's real talent is upsetting people—along with other self-destructive behavior like pissing off the loan sharks he's heavily in debt to.
Is it the search for assorted MacGuffii—bank-heist loot, giant opal, camera that records brainwave images the blind can see—that sends self-destructive Claire, her writer ex, and a bounty hunter after thief Sam Farber? Or is it love? Threatening in the wings is a nuclear satellite plunging to Earth that, if shot down, could create a chain-reaction atomic pulse that wipes all electronic circuit boards, including the file of the novel the film is being based upon.
Winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or and Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and International Feature, director, co-producer, and co-writer Bong Joon Ho's classist farce, Parasite, focuses on the Kims, a family of poor but proud con artists. Presently scrabbling to get by on lowest-paid jobs in a bug-infested basement apartment in Seoul, South Korea, they dream of climbing up to a better life by tricking the rich using flattery, charm, and well-rehearsed scripts.
Tensions, rivalries, banter, squabbling, self-aggrandizement, and, above all, putdowns add to the hot air on this day in the life of Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn as the 98 percent Black (down to 70 percent in the last census) community and small mix of Hispanics, Whites, and Asians try to get along during a sweltering summer.
S&M, voyeurism, murder, rape, violence, and torture. . . some of the typically wholesome activities to be found in small-town America. This psychosexual possible-murder mystery—set in a neo-Fifties 1980s logging town—soon gets weird when an innocent local finds a severed human ear in a field. Writer-director David Lynch uses various tactics to keep the viewer as off-balance as his attracted-to-the-hidden-underbelly protagonist.
"What are we doing here?" "I don't know." Stranger Than Paradise, the delightful deadbeat breakout film by writer/director Jim Jarmusch with its whack-character studies, unactorly acting, absurdist deadpan humor, and minimalist style brilliantly captured the mood of its time. It also established him as an instant auteur of the $100,000-budget, low-production-value indie-film scene and inspired many others to do likewise.