Author: Olivia Rutigliano

Film Review: Colette

The font chosen for the title fade-in of Colette is handwriting— flowing, quilled script. It is brisk and legible and slightly swirly. I’m not a graphologist, so will add only that the most noticeable aspect of this word, in this orientation, is its back half. There are two ts, next to each other, and both their stalks are crossed with a single horizontal line that floats slightly above their tops. This handwriting belongs to the film’s protagonist, Colette (Kiera Knightly), who at this point in the film (the opening credits) is unknown to the literary world, but who will...

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Film Review: The Sisters Brothers

This is probably too surface-level a claim with which to begin a review, but, anyway: despite its giggily title, the gold-rush-era Western The Sisters Brothers, which is based on the novel by Patrick deWitt, is not a comedy. It’s definitely not. It’s helpful to know this before seeing it, lest you become distractedly shocked by the film’s myriad representations of such viscerally unpleasant elements as: severe maiming of the skin, gruesome animal deaths, expulsions of bodily fluids, and nineteenth-century medical practices. The constant prompts for shock and repulsion are superbly engineered, emblematic of the film’s technical prowess, and all...

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