Drake had already hopped on as a producer. The film gained traction on Instagram after user was created to further authenticate the world of the film. With all his ambition resting on one night, Kurt is our mad-dog guide through LA’s pastiche nightscape, like a Bieber-haired Travis Bickle for the Incel Generation. Netflix hunk Joe Keery plays Kurt Kunkle, a psychotic Spree driver (of the title's fictional Lyft/Uber service) with a yearning for internet fame and murder on his mind. It's a heart pounding joyride called SPREE which was perhaps the best and least-on-the-nose isolation metaphor of the year. Hands down the film I’ve thought about most in 2020 has to come from a corner of the world where wanna-be influencers livestream all day for an audience of two people, and self-absorption swirls like a portal to hell. If you liked Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) you owe it to yourself to check this out. The fact that it was made with a seriously minimal crew (IMDb lists 13 credits including Varela’s own screenplay) makes it all the more staggering. Describing the narrative of Vitalina Varela makes it sound like The Third Man, but the film contains more images that have been forever burned into my brain than any other from 2020. The screen is nearly always submerged in shadow – even in the sequences shot in the daytime – and the soundtrack is made of barely anything more than whispers.Īs with his previous four (see the unforgettable Horse Money, in which our heroine Vitalina also appears), he commits absolutely to recording the truth and lived experiences of Cape Verdean migrants living in the now-demolished Lisbon neighbourhood of Fontainhas. Pedro Costa’s radical approach to storytelling makes most actual documentary filmmakers look like charlatans, and Vitalina Varela is his most extreme film to date. Anchored by phenomenal lead performances from Fairbrass and Clerkin, Muscle is a funny and disturbing eulogy for the lad-mag generation. The alpha-beta dichotomy as a means to explore the modern man in crisis is well-worn territory (anyone who’s seen Fight Clubwill have some sense of where this is all leading) but Johnson’s film is startlingly original. In Terry, Simon finds a trainer, mentor, and friend who pulls him into a steroidal underworld of fraternity and hedonism. In a trance-like state, he wanders into a barebones bodybuilding gym and is immediately seduced by the apparently straightforward vision of masculinity represented by man-mountain Terry (Craig Fairbrass). Trapped in a dead end job and a sexless relationship, Simon is lacking purpose or validation. Shot in stark black and white, director Gerard Johnson transforms the motorways and ring-roads of England’s North-East into an existential labyrinth in which call-centre employee Simon (Cavan Clerkin) finds himself confronting the dark heart of British machismo.
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