Giuppi's Movie Reviews

Best Picture 1. The Favourite 2. Roma 3. Cold War 4. Loro 5. Suspiria 6. If Beale Street Could Talk 7. Bad Times at the El Royale 8. First Reformed 9. Shoplifters 10. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Best Director 1. Alfonso Cuaròn, Roma 2. Pawel Pawlikowski, Cold War 3. Paul Schrader, First Reformed 4. Luca Guadagnino, Suspiria 5. Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite 6. Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk 7. Hirokazu Kore'eda, Shoplifters 8. Karyn Kusama, Destroyer 9. Marielle Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me? 10. Julian Schnabel, At Eternity's Gate Best Actor in a Leading Role 1. Willem Dafoe, At Eternity's Gate 2. Ethan Hawke, First Reformed 3. Alessandro Borghi, On My Skin 4. Lucas Hedges, Boy Erased 5. Bradley Cooper, A Star is Born 6. Marcello Fonte, Dogman 7. Toni Servillo, Loro 8. Victor Polster, Girl 9. Ryan Gosling, First Man 10. John David Washington, BlacKkKlansman Best Actress in a Leading Role 1. Rach...

Hi everyone! I'm sorry if I've being absent in the last few weeks, but I couldn't find the time to post my reviews here. I hope I'll be more active in the future, in the meantime I've decided to post here a few short reviews of some movies I've seen in the last month.  Monster  (2003) Patty Jenkins' Monster is mostly remembered for Charlize Theron's Oscar-winning turn as serial killer Aileen Wuornos. And while the actress' towering, bone-chilling performance is indeed its strongest asset, it's also a movie worth-mentioning per se. It's hardly a perfect film and from a technical point of view it leaves something to be desired. The cinematography is drab and unappealing, which could have been fitting for the story, but there's no sense of a visual style of any kind. The editing is clumsy, especially in an awkwardly done montage at the movie's end. The structure and the pace are problematic with some passages being far too rus...

The representation of LGBTQ+ characters has improved significantly over the last fifteen years, spreading through a variety of remarkable films. Films like Brokeback Mountain , Blue is the Warmest Colour , Carol , Moonlight and Call Me by Your Name are all masterpieces in their own, unique ways and they represent excellent achievements in both style and substance. There is one thing common to these movies: tragedy. Whether it is death, a painful separation or a bittersweet reunion, all of these characters must bear overwhelmingly aching consequences of their sexuality. This does not take away from the quality of the pictures themselves: as I said, they are all brilliant and deservedly recognized as such, and the tragedy is perfectly coherent to the setting and context of each movie. Love, Simon is certainly a far less ambitious movie than the previously mentioned and it does not reach their technical brilliance nor their raw power. In its style and its execution, Love, Simon ...

The Canaro's killing ("Il delitto del Canaro" in Italian) is one of Italy's most gruesome crimes in recent history. The night of February 18th 1988, Pietro De Negri, a dog coiffeur and small-time cocaine dealer living in Magliana (a small neighborhood in Rome), brutally murdered Giancarlo Ricci, a former boxer and cocaine addict who had long been physically abusive towards him. It's better to leave off the details of the homicide: it's enough to say that the mutilation of several body parts was involved. This tragic episode clearly influenced the realization of Dogman , though it's quite clear that Matteo Garrone ( Gomorra, Tale of Tales ) does not intend to do a faithful telling of a true story: the characters' names have been changed (Pietro De Negri becoming Marcello and Giancarlo Ricci becoming Simone), the story is set in present times instead of 1988 and the actual events play out in a very different way, especially towards the end. These ar...

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's Prime Minister in four governments, is one of the most fascinatingly puzzling figures of the country's last thirty years. His life is surrounded and punctuated by scandals and controversies, like the unknown source of his money early on in his career, the accusations of him being linked to Mafia, his tax frauds, his affairs with underage girls and prostitutes, his attempts to create laws ad personam to protect himself from criminal charges, his influence over Italian television and his inappropriate or even downright offensive behavior and remarks during national and international political meetings. The list goes on, and yet Berlusconi is still beloved and held in high esteem by a surprisingly large portion of Italian population - at this year election, Berlusconi's party (Forza Italia) received 14% of the votes even though the man himself was currently banned from any legislative office for six years (a sentence overturned in the last two d...

Alex Garland's directorial debut, Ex Machina , is widely recognized as one of the best movies of 2015: it was indeed a compelling, thrilling sci-fi that not only kept you on the edge of your seat for its whole running time but that was also a profoundly throught-provoking piece of art, a layered reflection on what defines human and not. Annihilation is a similar movie in terms of genre, though its aim is even higher this time around. Ex Machina was an intimate piece which managed to use its limited setting and its small number of characters to its advantage, creating an oppressively claustrophobic atmosphere; Annihilation , focusing on a dangerous odissey in an extraterrestrial place, is much bigger and ambitious in scope: the result is an occasionally interesting but more often problematic misfire whose flaws end up overshadowing its merits. The film's leading character is Lena (Natalie Portman), a biology teacher whose husband Kane (Oscar Isaac), an Army Special Forc...