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3 weeks ago | 
globalcomment.com | Mark Farnsworth
Stanley Kubrick called All That Jazz “the best film I think I’ve ever seen” and on first viewing it’s hard not to get swept away with the tumultuous bombast of Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical treatise of life, death and the meaning of art. From the off we are straddling cinematic ley lines that zag from Fellini’s 8 ½ to Kubrick’s own A Clockwork Orange before hurtling into the future (or is now the past?) of Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream.
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1 month ago | 
globalcomment.com | Mark Farnsworth
With Warfare their companion piece to last year’s best film Civil War, directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza have delivered something far more brutal and necessary than another war movie — they have crafted a cinematic trial by fire, a relentless excavation of the human spirit under siege. This is not a story of battles won or heroes made; it is a study in collapse, in futility, and in the terrifying banality of survival.
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2 months ago | 
globalcomment.com | Mark Farnsworth
There’s something uniquely unsettling about the idea of being disposable. Not just in a philosophical sense — we all feel replaceable sometimes — but in a literal, zero-hour, printed-on-your-contract kind of way. Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 takes this concept and runs with it, crafting a sci-fi film that’s equal parts existential crisis, corporate satire, and Philip K. Dick paranoia-soaked action-thriller.
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Mar 6, 2025 | 
globalcomment.com | Mark Farnsworth
The Brutalist traverses the industrial might of post-World War II America, straddling the landscape like a vengeful Cronus. This is the America of infinite trains, steel, concrete, glass, skyscrapers, modernity mined from the dead and dying husk of Europe.
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Feb 6, 2025 | 
globalcomment.com | Mark Farnsworth
Welcome to the future. Welcome to 1983. Welcome to Beyond the Black Rainbow. The digital year unfolds like the credits from Alien one number at a time, deliberate and sinister. Videotape is inserted, that plastic monolith capable of unlocking countless gateways to the stars and beyond.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
globalcomment.com | Mark Farnsworth
David Lynch’s films are not mere cinematic experiences — they are fever dreams, whispering across the fault lines of reality. To enter Lynch’s world is to surrender to the surreal, to accept that the ordinary can be disturbed by a malevolent hum or a crimson curtain drawn across the cosmos. Lynch doesn’t merely depict the surreal; he embodies it, creating a liminal space where nightmares and nostalgia entwine. Let us, for a moment, mourn the illusion that cinema is meant to make sense.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
globalcomment.com | Mark Farnsworth
Nosferatu wants to know where our prayers go when they have been cast into the ether. Do they rise before whatever gods we worship to join that vast and everlasting memorial, the eternal inbox, some more worthy than others of being answered? Do they flitter from pillar to post, discarded and downtrodden, never to be heard, skulking in the shadowy corners of some far-off heaven, trampled by the weight of human frailty?
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
globalcomment.com | Mark Farnsworth
“America’s not a country, it’s just a business. Now fucking pay me!” Jackie Cogan’s last line from Andrew Dominik’s gangster tragicomedy, Killing Them Softly is as powerful as anything in modern American cinema. It cuts the film dead, pulling the multi-cultural rug firmly out from under Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory speech. Jackie is immune from the bullshit. America will just go on fucking everybody over not matter how well intentioned the new president is.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
globalcomment.com | Mark Farnsworth
Heretic, directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, is a genre-bending film that draws viewers into a dark, thought-provoking thriller, packed with tension and laced with questions about faith, autonomy, and power. Here, Beck and Woods trade in jump scares for dialogue-heavy exchanges that unspool in a claustrophobic setting. This film doesn’t aim for simple shocks or catharsis but instead aims to unsettle the audience in a manner that reverberates long after the credits roll.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
globalcomment.com | Mark Farnsworth
Newport, Rhode Island 1903. The epilogue to Michael Cimino’s revisionist Western, Heaven’s Gate is an enigmatic affair set aboard an opulent yacht. You can practically taste the melancholy of the Gilded Age in Vlimos Zsigmond’s breath-taking cinematography. The ageing James Averill, once Marshal of Johnson County, is now dressed like a retired Commodore, clothing befitting the home of the United States Naval War College and his privileged birthright.
