In recent weeks, several prominent film critics have engaged in a lively back-and-forth about the question of "slow and boring" cinema. Hearkening back to the famous Pauline Kael-Andrew Sarris debates of the 60s-70s, this latest debate revives some of the classic, ongoing tensions in cinema, and raises fundamental questions about about the movies are for, and how we should watch them.
I Am Love
Embodying a style critic Manohla Dargis called "postclassical Hollywood baroque," I Am Love is one of those films that reminds us why we love movies so much. It puts the beauty of the world under a microscope in a way that feels both familiar and foreign, real and imaginary. It universalizes the foreign and makes the mundane transcendent.