Blackberry (2023)

Now Officially Streaming.

For the life of me, I’ll never be able to figure out the glut of product biographies being unleashed on audiences. We can’t be so bereft of material that we have to have a biographical film about the development of a hand held computer. I mean, the Blackberry was important and granted, a documentary would be great, but “Blackberry” on its own is just another stale drama that tries to enhance the mundanity of the development of Blackberry and transform it in to this “Wall Street” meets Aaron Sorkin suspense film about capitalism and the cut throat industries that battled to get ahead in the tech market.

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Leave the World Behind (2023)

Lady, people aren’t chocolates. D’you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastardcoated bastards with a bastard filling.” – Scrubs

Director Sam Esmail’s “Leave the World Behind” is a mean, nasty, and cynical apocalyptic parable that stages the quintessential end of the world scenario but also takes a magnifying glass to humanity and the inherent paranoia that transforms a scenario from working together to survive, to survival of the fittest. While some of the symbolism is a bit clunky in some spots, “Leave the World Behind” is a very volatile and relevant take on how we’re more likely to pick at each other’s bones and fight for scraps when resources become finite. While that does feel like old hat post apocalyptic fodder, “Leave the World Behind” is refreshingly complex and quite horrifying. 

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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Saules aveugles, femme endormie’) (2023)

Director Pierre Földes is not an artist prone to just giving us something that’s easily digestible and worthy of leaving us dangling. “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” is probably one of the most uncommercial movies of the year, and the fact that it’s fully animated also works in its favor. The animation style that is used along with the often intentional drabness of it all allows for an almost ethereal aesthetic; it’s one that feels so dream like. It’s almost like someone just ripped random imagery from someone’s subconscious and manifested it through some pretty good rotoscoping and 3D animation.

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