Farah Cheded

2 weeks ago | filmdaze.net | Farah Cheded

Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low is the kind of film you watch in a state of quasi-paralysis. The 1963 noir is both taut moral thriller and enthralling procedural — a film of relentless jaw-clenching tension and compulsive rhythm that sets the bar for everything it does. In short, it’s a masterpiece, and so it was always going to be tough for anyone to replicate its magic with a remake, even for a filmmaker of Spike Lee’s stature.

2 weeks ago | filmdaze.net | Farah Cheded

Wes Anderson is, quite famously, a details guy. Perfect symmetry, immaculate composition, and absolute devotion to every tiny element of his dollhouse creations — his work (and that of his behind-the-scenes collaborators) is dazzling in its dedication to the little things. The Phoenician Scheme, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, is no outlier in this respect.

3 weeks ago | filmdaze.net | Farah Cheded

Attending the Cannes Film Festival — like many things right now — is a dissonant experience. In between the buzzy back-to-back screenings, star-studded events, and myriad other shiny distractions this year, there were harrowing news headlines to be read that made all this focus on celebrity feel obscene, knowing a genocide was raging, virtually unobstructed, on the other side of the world.

1 month ago | avclub.com | Farah Cheded

One would be forgiven for feeling nervous that it’s Aster who’s handling this tinderbox, given that Eddington comes off the back of the Freudian provocation that was Beau Is Afraid. But unlike that movie, Eddington is more interested in exploring division than causing it. Aster takes great pains not to make a white-hat, black-hat movie that reflects already-entrenched culture war lines; he’s clearly much more interested in asking how those lines might have gotten so entrenched in the first place.

1 month ago | yahoo.com | Farah Cheded

As Ari Aster tells it, Eddington has been in the works for a long time. The director originally considered making his feature debut with the film before 2018’s Hereditary took that distinction, but watching the movie, it’s impossible to imagine what that early version might have looked like. Eddington fully immerses itself in the world of George Soros conspiracy theories, mask debates, George Floyd protests, Hillary Clinton body doubles, Bitcoin, AI, and Ma memes.