Taboo and dangerous and sexy and any number of lurid descriptors you can think of, what pierces through Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! most of all is how unbelievably vulnerable and sincere it is, focused on two characters who in their own unique ways are equally longing for love. Pedro Almodóvar deliciously plays with perception and expectation throughout this story, drawing us into certain notions of what this dynamic is and who these people are, then pulling the rug…
Overwhelmed by the magnitude and the intimacy of this. Feels like a true miracle it exists at all; how the instincts of the filmmakers paid off in following these two young men over the course of five years, pivoting course from the initial plans for this project and turning it into one of the most riveting, complex and resonant stories ever put to screen.
It’d be impossible to try and capture everything that makes this movie so magnificent, but top…
As a big Kore-eda fan, was definitely disappointed to find this one fairly flat. It’s really lacking the depth of character we usually get from him. Interestingly, I thought his earlier film Air Doll, while not being about AI, had more thematic introspection into the ethical and social questions concerning something akin to AI, which this one frustratingly felt like it was reticent to get into. While I appreciated the more humanist approach in the angle he took, lacking that specificity in character ends up creating a feeling of consistently wanting more from the film than what it is giving.
52 films I will watch in 2026: #25
This has been high on my watchlist since I interviewed Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese a couple years ago and they specifically referenced this as the key influence for how they approached DiCaprio’s character in The Departed (you can read that interview here). Watching it now, it’s clear to see that inspiration coming into play — both in terms of the moral conflicts the character faces in his circumstances, and particularly in…
Listen, I don’t disagree with anything this movie is saying about the commodification of women’s bodies and how that intersects with ageism (both internalized and externalized) and the nature of fame in the industry. But I think it’s got a Ruben Östlund level shallowness, lack of curiosity and insistence on punishing its audience with the same tepid observations slammed in your face like concrete over and over again into oblivion.
This is somehow 2 hours and 20 minutes of movie…
With peace and love, I have no idea what’s going on with the love for this movie. It’s... really bad? On a writing and directing level, this movie feels like it was made by high schoolers. Everything is so amateurishly cobbled together and scattershot, to a point where it’s almost shocking it was released like this. Decisions as simple as where the camera is, when a cut is made, or where a scene starts or ends so regularly feel unintentionally…
