As a connoisseur of "psychotic woman" films, I feel uniquely positioned to elucidate you: this is a wildly misogynistic and vapid text, despite its purportedly "woke" surface.

There is a long lineage of "crazy girlfriends" in cinema, not that Curry Barker seems to be aware. From the gold-diggersploitation fare of pre-code Hollywood, like Red-Headed Woman and Baby Face, in which Jean Harlow and Barbara Stanwyck play ruthless, ambitious women who use their boyfriends up for their own means, right through…

“Why can’t things just stay the same?”

Patronising, orientalist, boomer-core humanism. It did not surprise me to learn that this is essentially a sponcon tourist advert.

You can tell this was made by a Westerner because it treats Japanese life as inherently humble, wholesome, virtuous and simple. You can tell it was made by a boomer because it lionises analogue media, talking down to young people and treating disabled and homeless people like quirky curiosities. And you can tell this…

For years now I have been begging directors, through the medium of letterboxd reviews (and the power of telepathy) to abandon capitalist realism. To resist the urge to make films that perform “our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.” (In fact I’ve used this very Mark Fisher quote in multiple reviews). I’ve been desperate, begging, on my knees, for someone, anyone, to offer us a vision of the world that doesn’t already exist. To use…