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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Skateboard: The Movie (1978)

Now in Limited Release in New York, and California; debuting November 10th in MN, November 15th at the Gateway Film Center in Columbus, OH, November 26th at the The Texas Theater in Oak Cliff, TX, and December 9th/10th at the Cleveland Cinematheque in Cleveland, OH. Check Local Theater Listings.

I guess if you fancy yourself a completist, or have to watch every sports movie ever made, “Skateboard: The Movie” is a fascinating relic of a pretty great bygone era. It’s not at all a good movie per se, but I liked director George Gage’s movie for the way it works as a time capsule for the late seventies. It was a precursor to a lot of interesting concepts, including turning skateboarding in to a bonafide tournament sport, the way the media would inevitably drift over to skateboarding, as well as the whole attitude of the decade. The entirety of “Skateboard: The Movie” is punctuated by a lot of moog/synthesizer music, as well as a ton of pretty good pop rock music that lends it a real energy. 

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