The New Classics: Moonlight

By Michael Cusumano 

Scene: Kevin and Black at the Diner
We consider Trevante Rhodes’s Black carefully throughout the last act of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, searching for traces of the younger versions of his character. That we don’t find many is not surprising considering how we’ve seen this child get battered and abused by life. Chiron doesn’t grow from segment to segment so much as he transforms as survival demands. Moonlight’s second movement ends on such a violent act of self-annihilation, we should be surprised to spot any remnant of the adolescent in Black when he walks into Kevin’s diner a decade later. 

And yet despite the intimidating presence Black developed as a barrier against the world, the aspect that unmistakably connects him with his teenage self, and to Little before that, is his fragility. All his outward defenses - the bulked up physique, the sullen manner - hang on him like an ill-fitting suit of armor. When he is in the presence of Andre Holland’s Kevin it looks a stiff breeze would blow him over...

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Great Scenes Galore

The Film Bitch Awards are nearly wrapped with the "Best Scenes" page finished (only cameo/limited performances remain). Check the new page out for the choices for Best Kiss, Best Sex Scene, Best Credit Sequence, Best Openings, Best Endings and more. Do you share the love of these particular moments from Gloria Bell, Little Women, MidSommar, Knives Out, Pain and Glory, Parasite, Us and more? The medals will be announced soon. 

The Decline of Skywalker

by Ginny O'Keefe

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!! 

I’ve been a die-hard Star Wars fan since I was four years old. I had been eagerly awaiting the release of Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker since 2017. With the film rapidly losing screens now in its 9th weekend and approaching a final box office tally that's significantly less than its predecessor, I began to think about my own enormous disappointment. I must not be alone. To preface my reaction I should say that I have seen EVERY SINGLE Star Wars movie that has been released since I was born more than once in theatres. Until now...

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Soundtracking: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

by Chris Feil

Perfect movie endings are hard to come by. And I don’t mean a great sticking of the landing or simply ending on a high note - I mean a perfect ending. But of the ones that quickly come to mind, music feels like an essential component to the magic. Gloria (and her Bell counterpart) dancing her way into a resilient future, 45 Years slowly crescendoing to sudden romantic collapse, morbid opulence and ego to bring All That Jazz to meet its maker.

Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice belongs in that very special class, closing its satire by ascending the audience into a higher plane of communal experience. The film is already sublime, but its coda stands apart.

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The New Classics - Y Tu Mama Tambien

Michael Cusumano here to add a title that is near and dear to my heart to the New Classics pantheon 

Scene: Epilogue
The Narrator in coming-of-age stories most often represents a grown-up version of the protagonist. Think The Sandlot or A Christmas Story, or the quintessential example, The Wonder Years, voices looking back, awash in nostalgia. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También not only is the narrator not a character, but the voice is indifferent, even coldly clinical in its omniscience, as likely to note the fate of a passing group of wild pigs as to reveal the deepest secrets of the protagonists.

We get used to the voice as a welcome companion throughout the film. Its flat, objective viewpoint is a welcome respite from the main trio’s frequent emotional upheavals. Little do we realize we are being set up for the emotional gut punch of the film’s epilogue...

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