Die My Love (2025)

★★★½
Capsule Review

Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love is a scorching and uncompromising examination of a woman's mental deterioration starting with her postpartum depression and following her through a maddening descent into the darkest recesses of her mind. The sequence of events unravels. How much is authentic? Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star as Grace and Jackson, who move into an old family home and aim to start a family there. After the birth of her child, Grace experiences depression and boredom, but she also exhibits odd behavior like crawling on the ground and hallucinating. While the movie progresses more or less in a linear fashion, there are seemingly unrelated sidesteps in the narrative and drastic jumps in time that illustrate Grace's fragmented state of mind. Lawrence's performance is stellar. John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence is a clear inspiration, but Ramsay's movie stands on its own with its surreal imagery to carry it.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

American Pie (1999)

★★★
American Pie came along when I needed it. I've lauded 1999 on this website as my favorite movie year. Personally, though, I was in a bit of a funk that summer. I enjoyed South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me before this, but they weren't enough. American Pie snapped me out of it. Everything was okay going forward. Jim Levenstein's foibles were more than just easy lowbrow attempts at humor in a high school sex comedy. They were keen observations of a confusing and irrational period of life during which the ability to have second thoughts about one's actions has yet to emerge as a stabilizing force. Jim and his buddies make decisions that teenagers would make and are convinced that their actions are correct, but these decisions originate from a point of view unshaped by real world experience.

Bugonia (2025)

★★★½
Capsule Review

Director Yorgos Lanthimos takes the premise of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! and, with a keen eye and experienced hand, elevates it to soaring heights. That's okay. It's happened before. Vanilla Sky was superior to the original Spanish film Open Your Eyes. In Bugonia, cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnap the C.E.O. of a pharmaceutical company and hold her hostage on the belief that she is an alien from outer space on a mission to destroy humanity. Michelle (Emma Stone) tries to convince them she is not an alien, but they don't listen, which leads to a power struggle between the two sides to see who will emerge victorious (either them, by getting on to her "spaceship," or her, by escaping). Lanthimos improves upon the original by establishing the paranoia of the abductors before the abduction takes place, by allowing the abductee to assert her position strongly and by placing less emphasis on the law enforcement subplot. The result is a more accomplished film that delivers a powerful punch.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

Save the Green Planet! (2003)

★★★
Capsule Review

Paranoia fuels this little shocker from South Korea. In Save the Green Planet!, a loner and conspiracy theorist kidnaps a high-profile C.E.O. and holds him hostage because he is convinced that this public figure is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy. Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun) and his girlfriend Suni (Hwang Jeong) bind and gag their victim Kang Man-shik (Baek Yoon-sik) and torture him until he confesses. I watched this after watching the American remake Bugonia, and the remake is the better version of the same story. Writer and director Jang Joon-hwan came up with this highly original concept and filmed it with passion, but his completed project had room to improve. Kang's manipulation of Lee towards the end plays too quickly. I preferred Emma Stone's calculating persuasion. Jang's movie is a great template, but on its own as a study of paranoia and the extremes someone could take it, Save the Green Planet! works well enough.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

Café au Lait (1994)

★★½
Capsule Review

Lola (Julie Mauduech) is pregnant, and the question of who the father is dominates the story early. There are two possibilities, but the answer to the question is resolved before we expect it. Rather than keep us in suspense, director Mathieu Kassovitz (who also wrote and stars) uses the question to examine how the two potential fathers feel drawn to Lola and how the men might feel about each other. His story creates an interesting dynamic that sees Felix (Kassovitz) and Jamal (Hubert Koundé) at first as competitors and eventually as partners to ensure Lola's comfort during the later stages of her pregnancy. Their collaboration is tenuous at best, resulting in outburst and reconciliation and back again. The actors are good enough to perform what the script asks of them, but there isn't much narrative thrust to make for an engrossing story. The actors and costar Vincent Cassel as Felix's friend would reunite in La Haine, which is nothing like Café au Lait and much more accomplished.

© 2023 Silver Screen Reviews