Once Upon a Time In… Hollywood (2019)

The movie is infused with its marker's obsessions and perspective and, so, is alive and personal. Tarantino's suspense is Lynchian and Hitchcockian. His drama is the mystery that life becomes once its characters approach it as detectives, as they should.

It is easy to be generous when one is rich. To be generous when one is poor and ambitious is the true nobility.

Chernobyl (2019)

The redeeming feature of the series is that it motivates one to consult Wikipedia, with which the series competes in dramatic depth and to which it loses in factual accuracy. There is nothing particularly Russian or Soviet about the characters, who are presented as generic Europeans, as if recreated by a creative committee from images on ancient vases and poems scribbled in a tongue long foreign to the modern ear. The visuals are compelling.

Carol (2015)

It is one of those rare movies whose protagonists one cannot imagine portrayed by anyone but the movie’s actual stars. One sees immediately why Carol (Cate Blanchett) falls in love with Therese (Rooney Mara), from the first sight. One sees immediately what Therese finds so irresistible about Carol. What follows is a sequence of yeses, to oneself and to each other, that—that, and cash—infuse the film with a much greater sense of freedom than would have been warranted by the stifling attitudes of the times and the timeless prejudice against personal happiness alone. One can be decisive in one’s choices because they reflect examined preferences or because they reflect a firm commitment to such examination. It was this decisiveness that both lovers found so attractive in each other—that, and the class transcending the circumstance. Each one had a version of the other live inside her mind long before their meeting in flesh.