Vinicius8

"Anora" is a movie written, directed, produced, and edited by Sean Baker. It tells the story of the titular character's (that goes by Ani) relationship with a wealthy playboy (Vanya) whose father is a powerful Russian oligarch.

Ani is tasked with taking care of Vanya during his visit to the strip club she works at, due to the fact that she speaks a bit of Russian. Their time together keeps getting prolonged due to Vanya's disposition to continuously pay Ani, deepening their bond and, conversely, resulting in dire consequences.

Like all of Baker's works, "Anora" too delves into the lives of a marginalized segment of the north-american population and explores themes contingent on their personal and social context. Although sex-work is a common theme on Baker's films, it is never about a faceless group and generalizations about their situation. Anora has a name and a face and the movie is clearly about "a" sex-worker, not "any" sex-worker, despite the fact that Ani could be Any one of these very real people (if you get what I'm saying). But first and foremost, she is Ani, and we watch as Ani navigates the encroaching chaos surrounding her disruptive relationship with Vanya.

Some people have noted that this movie is, among other things, about class struggles and although it's possible to see it that way, it's wrong to assume Vanya is simply a caricature of the "rich white kid", just as it's wrong to assume Ani is a caricature of the "traumatized sex-worker". If you pay enough attention, your patience will be rewarded and you'll be met with characters with much more to offer than simplistic tropes.

Sean Baker is a humanist through and through, and "Anora" is no exception to his masterful collection of works. It captures reality through a subjetive lens, structuring the film in a manner that evokes in us an experience not too dissimilar from that of Ani. It's intelligent, creative and arresting. For what it aims to be, it's a perfect accomplishment.

Read my complete (psychological) analysis on Medium @vpedrotti.

"Better Man" is a surprising flick.

Not because of the monkey, the effect of that gimmick wears off pretty quickly. Although it is surprising how fast I became accustomed to the singing chimpanzee and how invested and heartened I got by the story.

But even though all of that is true, the main motive for my astoundment was how honest the movie was.

"Better Man" gives us a very raw look into Robbie Williams life, flaws and all. Actually, his flaws are what's under the spotlight. Even the choice of representing himself as an ape reflects that. At the beginning of the movie, Robbie's voice-over explains to us that we are about to see how he sees himself.

William's suffered from eating disorders, self-image problems and a multitude of mental health and drug related issues. "Better Man" doesn't shy away from the various factors that forged this hellish psychological landscape and offers us interesting insight into the life and mind of an artist that, on top of all that, also suffered from "fame".

Despite this, I found the movie to be an assault on the senses. It's too much all the time, with brief moments of rest inbetween. After the story picks momentum, it doesn't stop. Conversations mend with narration. Each event unravels into the next. An emotional moment turns into song and it never lets up. At 2 hours and 15 minutes runtime, it's a very tiring ordeal. Nonetheless, it's narratively cohesive and it makes sense to be like this. It even makes sense that the film offers us zero introspection. It's all a fitting portrayal of the person it aims to represent on-screen and consistent with its objective of entertaining audiences. It's just a shame it didn't reach one.

Heretic had an interesting, solid first half or so. It relied mostly on dialogue to create tension and did a good job at that. Hugh Grant did amazing playing a charismatic antagonist with a gusto that made the movie far better than the script allowed it to be - at least in regards to its final act. And so, about that...

Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoyed Heretic. But I was led to believe it was something it didn't turn out to be, and that, to me, is a very grave narrative sin. The first part of the movie set it up to be a psychological thriller about philosophical aspects of religion. Despite being a bit on the nose with the discussion of its themes, it showed some potential by addressing the implications of the systematization of belief, its relation to personal experience of the supernatural/transcendental and the validity of more specific doctrines. The only problem was that Heretic seemed confused about which of these points to focus on, deciding instead to only address these issues in passing during the second act with long-winded rants from Grant's character. These rants were clearly partisan, but allowed for a clever remark or two to manifest. By the third act, any semblance of cleverness disappeared.

In the end, Heretic posed some interesting questions, but failed to bring anything new to the discussion and resolved the whole situation by oversimplifying the matter at hand and resorting to old tricks from the horror genre guidebook. To borrow the character's metaphor: for a film that set up such a fine, fancy table, it's a shame they ended up serving us an unsavory BigMac as the main course.