Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning was my favorite film of 2020 and I've been dying to see this ever since it premiered in Venice last year. Maybe not the best thing to watch on the eve of Mother's Day however (or then again maybe the perfect thing to watch). A grim and potent mixture of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Jonathan Glazer. Not a shot wasted. And those storms! Play it loud.
Roland Garros 1981, the golden age of tennis. Borg, McEnroe, Connors, Evert, Mandlikova, Lendl, Yannick Noah, Ilie Nastase... are all looking incredibly fresh-faced in this sunny, dusty, fly on-the-wall verité masterpiece. See them crammed into tiny locker rooms, or pushing through court-invading paparazzi and hordes of teens after every match, or just sitting around shooting the shit, watching the matches on crappy TVs. After two weeks of the well-oiled money-making machine that is the US Open, it’s astonishing to see…
Random thoughts:
If anyone loves this movie it's because they're pure-hearted and uncynical and I'm not mad at them for that. But Megalopolis makes me realize I really don't like maximalism (or that maximalism is just really hard to do). I just clicked on Chloe Fineman's filmography and saw that she was also in White Noise and Babylon—so basically in three of the most overstuffed and exhausting movies of the last couple of years.
In the second scene of the…
