Emma Stone Archives | Deep Focus Review

Eddington

Brian Eggert — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:53:21 +0000

Listen to the audio version of this review. Ari Aster dissects the culture war with Eddington, a portrait of how COVID-19 irrevocably tore America apart at its already frayed seams. The pandemic intensified partisan rancor, social fragmentation, and reactionary behavior—conditions that enabled opportunists to seize power amid the chaos and, ultimately, profit from it. Set in late May 2020, the film looks back five years at the titular New Mexico town, seemingly in an attempt to understand what led to the erosion of democracy in Trump’s America today. Described as a Western in the promotional materials, it’s also a period piece, though the time hardly feels that long ago, much to the film’s detriment. Still, Aster captures the uncertainty, paranoia, and desperate search for answers that drove people to rely on the worst possible source: social media. Rather than offering clarity, it only deepened the divide between the right and left, as both sides leaned into their worst impulses and most extreme reactions. Fortunately, Eddington boasts an excellent cast, led by another tour-de-force performance by Joaquin Phoenix under Aster’s direction. It’s unquestionably well-crafted and brimming with the director’s anxiety-ridden style. But the question remains: Is now the right time for […]

The post Eddington appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Kinds of Kindness

Brian Eggert — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 19:50:14 +0000

Compliance, doubles, ominous dreams, car crashes, druggings, social control, animalistic human behavior, and self-annihilation to feel loved—these themes permeate Kinds of Kindness, an anthology by Yorgos Lanthimos, the experimental Greek filmmaker whose absurdist cinema conjures both admiration and revulsion, often (and hopefully) both. Such themes extend to his other films, revealing the dichotomy between humanity’s base nature and our pretense as a civilized species, our desire for freedom despite our need for order, and, above all, the humiliating lengths we will go for love. In his breakout feature, Dogtooth (2009), Lanthimos explored parents who shelter their pet-like children from the world, establishing a distinct method of obedience. A similar family dynamic inhabits The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), a revenge story that shows a paterfamilias’ authority over his family and career to be vulnerable and false. Lanthimos also characterizes how our need to feel loved results in self-debasement or self-destruction in The Lobster (2015) and The Favourite (2018). Kinds of Kindness revisits these ideas in a trilogy of surreal stories written by Lanthimos and his frequent collaborator Efthymis Filippou, each mining humanity’s relationship with control and desire. Likely to draw ire from the same literalists who slung moral judgments […]

The post Kinds of Kindness appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Poor Things

Brian Eggert — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 13:26:33 +0000

Note: This review was originally published on November 15, 2023, for DFR’s Patreon community. Yorgos Lanthimos chisels away at the artifice of polite society in Poor Things, an uninhibited and delightfully grotesque feature about how the civilizing process stifles personal freedoms, introduces shame, and suppresses natural bodily processes and desires. Set in an alternate Victorian London, the film begins with notes of Georges Méliès’ fantastical silent-era cinema blended with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but soon it resembles a steampunk dreamscape visualized by Terry Gilliam and thematically loaded with female empowerment. At the center is Emma Stone, giving a liberated, primal performance as the reanimated creation of the resident mad scientist, who took the brain of a pregnant suicide victim’s unborn baby and placed it inside the mother’s adult body. From this launchpad, Lanthimos shoots for the moon, exploring the many pleasures and degradations that make us human, even though the culture at large may consider them taboo to discuss or depict. Similar to his efforts in Dogtooth (2009) and The Lobster (2015), the Greek writer-director considers how society conditions people, especially women, over the course of youth and adolescence, to curb innate responses and curiosities. Wildly funny, visually inspired, and thematically ambitious […]

The post Poor Things appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Zombieland: Double Tap

Brian Eggert — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 18:30:04 +0000

Zombieland: Double Tap is smart enough to know the odds are against it. As the first sequel to the 2009 original, it has taken a decade to reach theaters. The movie will doubtless suffer the same fate as other long-delayed sequels such as last year’s Incredibles 2, which was preceded by such an extensive period of waiting that audiences may have given up hope of ever seeing it. By the time it arrived, many felt disappointed or underwhelmed. Expectations had risen to outrageous extremes, making it impossible to achieve the anticipated greatness that in the interim fans had believed inevitable. But just like Incredibles 2, the follow-up to Zombieland is a worthy sequel whose only major problem is that it took too long to get into theaters. That’s hardly something to blame on the movie, a delightful retread of the comic dynamism and undead peril that defined the original. The full cast has returned (all four of them), and everyone appears quite happy to be back into character. The material even feels refreshing, despite coming out in the wake of countless zombie movies and television shows in the last decade. Though the rise and subsequent decline of AMC’s The Walking […]

The post Zombieland: Double Tap appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

The Favourite

Brian Eggert — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 02:49:50 +0000

For Yorgos Lanthimos and his screenwriters of The Favourite, Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, history is an interplay of observation and anachronism. Set during the early 1700s in the court of Queen Anne, the English costume drama is shot with extreme wide-angle lenses, giving the vast interiors, ornamented with immense tapestries and huge, ornate furniture, the look of a fishbowl enclosure into which the audience observes from a bemused distance. What unfolds is not a rigid or even Hollywoodized version of history; rather, the film uses history as a reflector, a platform for another discussion altogether. Whether The Favourite, about two women vying for the good favor of their Queen in a viperous competition, has something specific to say about modern-day politics, gender relations, or the female experience remains debatable. Yet its cynicism and critique of the royal classes, in all of their debauched and base behavior, putrid goutiness, and sexual inelegance, is a target that provides a timeless contrast between the regal setting and the depraved conduct. When a bunch of bewigged nobles toss oranges at a chubby, naked jester in a slow-motion display, one cannot help but think of that intentionally tasteless, ad-libbed joke that ends with the […]

The post The Favourite appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Battle of the Sexes

Brian Eggert — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 14:43:28 +0000

Watching Battle of the Sexes, viewers will draw inevitable comparisons between the publicity-driven 1973 tennis match and the 2016 presidential election, as many critics already have. The film details the fervor surrounding male champ Bobby Riggs, and his chauvinist-and-proud campaign to goad the women’s champ Billie Jean King into a tournament that, from his perspective, would prove once and for all that female tennis players were inferior to male players. Performed at the Houston Astrodome for a $100,000 prize (with the sexist wink of Sugar Daddy candy bars as a major sponsor), the outcome represented a victory for gender equality and women’s rights. The 2016 election also pitted a misogynist blowhard against a (decidedly less heroic) female opponent, but the fallout signified, among countless other consequences, that gender inequality and discrimination is very much alive in American culture. But perhaps linking these two competitions ignores the other examples of gender inequality in our society. Battle of the Sexes is less a mirror image of the 2016 presidential election—however tempting, and apt, such comparisons may be—than a synecdoche of how little gender politics in America have changed in the last four decades. The film is directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who made Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and Ruby […]

The post Battle of the Sexes appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

La La Land

Brian Eggert — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:00:09 +0000

Jazz requires a constant reinvention of melodies and rhythms; it affirms what came before even as musicians improvise and reinterpret to create something altogether new. Damien Chazelle’s La La Land may seem deceptively frivolous at first glance, an old-fashioned Hollywood musical filled with splashy, bright-colored visuals, and characters who burst into song at random. But the philosophy of jazz serves as the writer-director’s inspiration both on and off-screen. As demonstrated by his 2014 sophomore effort Whiplash, Chazelle’s evident love of jazz and music in general seeps into his films. With La La Land, he composes a loving ode to the cinema of yesteryear; however, the film plays less like a replica of dream factory razzle-dazzle than an urgent call to appreciate how the traditional can be lovingly formed into something new. Though well-viewed cinéastes will spot Chazelle’s numerous filmic influences in any given scene of his bright and magnificently entertaining musical, its lively formal energy and affecting narrative amount to more than a simple homage. From the film’s first moments when “presented in CinemaScope” appears onscreen, Chazelle’s unabashed love of classic cinema becomes apparent. Films like Brigadoon or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers helped popularize the ultra-wide format in the […]

The post La La Land appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Irrational Man

Brian Eggert — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 00:00:59 +0000

Thinking about murder is natural, therapeutic even. Over a drink, friends might deliberate in jest about how to carry out the proverbial perfect murder. There’s a great scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt where a suburban paterfamilias sits down with his neighbor Herb to discuss how they plan to kill one another. When his wife scolds him for such morbid conversation, he replies, “We’re not talking about killing people. Herb’s talking about killing me and I’m talking about killing him.” In Irrational Man, Woody Allen explores the concept of a radical philosophy professor who justifies the ethical implications of murdering a corrupt judge because he determines its positive effect on society results in a moral act. Not unlike Jean-Paul Sartre’s views on the responsibility of freedom, Allen seems to believe that people determine their own moral guidelines—that ethics are a matter of individual conscience. Social and religious structures usually inform moral choices, applying notions of law and sin to our collective conscience; as individuals, we embrace certain rules and choose to abide by them. These structures vary depending on the individual society and, even further, the individual’s own ability to engage in an existential search for answers and […]

The post Irrational Man appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Aloha

Brian Eggert — Fri, 29 May 2015 00:00:13 +0000

Cameron Crowe’s writerly self-indulgence turns his latest opus, Aloha, into an incoherent jumble of unrealized subplots, desperately whimsical behavior, overcomplicated backstories, and forced romantic chemistry. At the very least, Crowe’s deep appreciation for his film’s Hawaiian backdrop remains unmistakable, even if everything else about this romantic comedy is a confusing mess. Crowe weaves together a half-dozen subplots, tossing in the kitchen sink and all, in a manner that feels like an artist with too many ideas trying to get them all out at once. No doubt Crowe’s editor Joe Hutshing had a pickle of a time trying to assemble the footage into a cohesive film—a task at which he ultimately failed. Indeed, Aloha feels like a patchwork, assembled out of unfinished moments between underdeveloped characters. Perhaps on his reputation alone, the writer-director assembled his impressive all-star cast—including Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, and Rachel McAdams—to perform in this untidy story of redemption, but even the pretty faces that carry the picture can’t make up for the overwritten screenplay. Cooper is Brian Gilcrest, a former pilot and space enthusiast with a shadowy past in the Middle East. Now he’s a defense contractor hired by an eccentric billionaire (Bill Murray) to oversee the […]

The post Aloha appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Brian Eggert — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 00:00:21 +0000

Back in 1989, Michael Keaton starred in Batman and helped launch an era of superhero tentpoles designed for maximum commercial appeal and franchise potential, a trend that has only recently reached an all-consuming high in Hollywood. After the sequel, Batman Returns, he opted out of the cape and cowl, and despite some shining moments in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and Steven Soderberg’s Out of Sight, Keaton’s post-Bat career has slipped away from him, and he’s rarely lived up to his potential. But all of his talent floats back to the surface in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s achingly self-referential Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), in which Keaton plays a washed-up former superhero actor yearning for artistic recognition on Broadway, while his personal life falls apart around him. And while his character may not achieve validation gracefully, Keaton’s performance will likely give the real-life actor a needed revival. Having five films to his name, Iñárritu collaborated with writer Guillermo Arriaga on three of them—Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel—and then made Biutiful in 2010, all of them weighty, serious-minded, and “realistic” features. Iñárritu becomes downright playful, however, with Birdman, co-writing a bravado comic fantasy alongside his three co-writers: playwright Alexander Dinelaris […]

The post Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) appeared first on Deep Focus Review.