Louis Cancelmi Archives | Deep Focus Review

Sorry, Baby

Brian Eggert — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:42:16 +0000

Listen to the audio version of this review. With Sorry, Baby, writer-director-star Eva Victor rethinks how cinema portrays and processes trauma, and it’s not with sensationalism or buzzy terminology, but with restraint, humor, and compassion. Victor stars as Agnes, a literature professor working at the same New England college where she once attended grad school and survived a sexual assault. The film explores what it means to feel stuck and unable to see a path forward. Victor acknowledges that it’s impossible to anticipate or shield against every terrible thing that might happen, and when something does occur, how one responds is often an unconscious reaction. Some people repress the experience, only for the feelings to return with a vengeance, while others try to confront it directly and endure the psychological collision. Regardless, trauma reframes self-image, raising introspective questions: Agnes wonders how she would have been different had this never happened to her. Should she mourn the version of her that might have been? Sorry, Baby doesn’t pretend to offer answers. Instead, it gently observes how healing can emerge out of supportive friendships, empathetic strangers, plenty of time, and perhaps also a kitten. Sorry, Baby is structured into chapters, each covering […]

The post Sorry, Baby appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Brian Eggert — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 12:57:20 +0000

A sprawling and thoughtful epic, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon details a horrific and mostly overlooked chapter of American history. Marked by greed and murder, the story, at its most basic level, is about the evil that men do. Based on the best-selling nonfiction book by David Grann—published in 2017 under the title Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI—the film details how ruthless white men conspired to steal wealth from the Osage Nation, whom they deemed unworthy of such riches, to the extent that they systematically murdered them to obtain it. Although the story is a microcosmic account of the crimes against Native Americans in the name of Manifest Destiny, money, land, and white superiority, Scorsese’s film commits a forgotten history to a visual and thematic panorama—a cinematic memory that no one will soon forget. Teaming for the first time in a single film with his two most frequent collaborators, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour film probes into not just the investigation that uncovered the conspiracy but also the curious case of pathological compartmentalization that fuelled the actions of its perpetrators. In both form and narrative power, […]

The post Killers of the Flower Moon appeared first on Deep Focus Review.