Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)
When I first heard about a sequel to Sicario – one of my favourite films of 2015 – my first thought was ‘why does this need to exist?’ Having seen the film, I don’t have a satisfactory answer to that question.
A Perfect Day (2015)
A Perfect Day is a film about futility. Turns out, though, that it’s pretty futile to try and make a successful drama out of fundamentally powerless protagonists.
Drafted Into the War on Drugs: Denis Villeneuve’s Tense Sicario
Trust Denis Villeneuve to take what could have been a fairly conventional drug war thriller and transform it into a hollowed-out horror movie. His latest film, Sicario is, at its core, a scathing indictment of modern American patriarchy. He pulled a similar trick with 2013’s underrated Prisoners, realising an unapologetically pulpy script as a deeply…
Critical Dissent: Debating Inherent Vice with Yen Nguyen
It’s fair to say that Inherent Vice, the latest from American auteur Paul Thomas Anderson, is a divisive film. This adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel is a digressive, intoxicated journey through 1970s California as perpetually-stoned PI Larry Sportello – everyone just calls him “Doc” – (Joaquin Phoenix) stumbles into a world of neo-Nazis, property…
Traffic (2000)
It’s easy to characterise Traffic as a by-the-numbers message film, a screed against the “war on drugs” that even colour-codes each of its various storylines to avoid confusion. Each storyline is custom-built to demonstrate the futility of the early-‘90s anti-drug initiatives of the United States, whether it’s someone immediately rising to replace an incarcerated druglord…
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