Taboo and dangerous and sexy and any number of lurid descriptors you can think of, what pierces through Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! most of all is how unbelievably vulnerable and sincere it is, focused on two characters who in their own unique ways are equally longing for love. Pedro Almodóvar deliciously plays with perception and expectation throughout this story, drawing us into certain notions of what this dynamic is and who these people are, then pulling the rug…

Overwhelmed by the magnitude and the intimacy of this. Feels like a true miracle it exists at all; how the instincts of the filmmakers paid off in following these two young men over the course of five years, pivoting course from the initial plans for this project and turning it into one of the most riveting, complex and resonant stories ever put to screen.

It’d be impossible to try and capture everything that makes this movie so magnificent, but top…

Keaton Fest 2026: #33

Been seeing this one on the radar for Keaton Fest from the start, anticipating it being the absolute bottom of the barrel, just given how completely non-existent this movie actually is culturally (never a good sign when my colleagues here haven‘t even had time or requests to give a film page a backdrop), it barely creeping over 1k members having marked it watched, and the few friends I do have that have seen it giving it…

Listen, I don’t disagree with anything this movie is saying about the commodification of women’s bodies and how that intersects with ageism (both internalized and externalized) and the nature of fame in the industry. But I think it’s got a Ruben Östlund level shallowness, lack of curiosity and insistence on punishing its audience with the same tepid observations slammed in your face like concrete over and over again into oblivion.

This is somehow 2 hours and 20 minutes of movie…

With peace and love, I have no idea what’s going on with the love for this movie. It’s... really bad? On a writing and directing level, this movie feels like it was made by high schoolers. Everything is so amateurishly cobbled together and scattershot, to a point where it’s almost shocking it was released like this. Decisions as simple as where the camera is, when a cut is made, or where a scene starts or ends so regularly feel unintentionally…