The Power of the Dog (2021)

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Campion's solemn and unaffecting Western, an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Savage, reminds me of the movies of Paul Thomas Anderson — The Master and Phantom Thread, for example — in the way its gorgeous, elaborate evocation of a world — cattle ranching in (New Zealand standing in for) Montana — ends up being for nought, the grand staging in the end unwarranted by what turns out to be just a queer little episode of crime involving four characters all so deeply repressed that their motivations scene-to-scene — if they are not vanished completely in one of the choppy-changey tv-series-style chapters — remain a mystery — in lieu of personality is offered up homosexuality and alcoholism, as if this is all we need to know.

★★★☆☆

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In The Cut (2003)

I love Meg Ryan as a non-comedic actress and I love Jane Campion's intelligent films, and I love Mark Ruffalo and mysteries and thrillers, which is why it pains me to say I don't very much love this ambitious Jane Campion mystery thriller starring a deadly serious Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo because while the movie is a clever feminist text with its message written into every line of dialogue and squeezed eloquently into the title and palpable in every scene (all of them, but consider for example Ryan and Ruffalo's first love scene which starts as a reenactment of an assault, or Ryan's self-conscious out-loud articulation of public transport poetry), In The Cut, about a serial killer who disarticulates women, doesn't work as a mystery thriller because everyone in the movie's claustrophobic circle of action is a disgusting misogynistic objectifier of women and long before the film ends it ceases to matter who among the lunatics - the really obvious culprit or one of the others on the periphery - is the killer, and unfortunately endscenes set in what is an absurd symbolic dreamscape do a disservice to the strong feminist text AND the mystery thriller.

★★★☆☆

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