Asteroid City (2023) | REVIEW

Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck leaning out of a window in Wes Anderson’s ASTEROID CITY — PHOTO: Focus Features / Universal Pictures International.

Directed by Wes Anderson — Screenplay by Wes Anderson — Story by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola.

Everyone who has ever seen one Wes Anderson film knows exactly what a Wes Anderson film looks like. His signature style has made him a lot of fans and admirers over the years, and it has also earned him some notable imitators. Nowadays, with the advent of AI, automatically generated images, and the like, a trend of recreating fake film trailers in the style of Wes Anderson has surfaced. You can now go online and find several videos hyping up fake Wes Anderson-style films with AI-generated images of well-known actors that don’t exactly look right (I even saw one for a fake American adaptation of the iconic Danish Olsen Gang films). With the emergence of such artificiality leading to so many conflicting emotions, might I suggest that you check out the real thing? Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s eleventh feature-length film, is well worth seeking out. As a matter of fact, I think it might be one of his best. 

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REVIEW: Kimi (2022)

Zoë Kravitz as Angela Childs in Steven Soderbergh’s KIMI — Photo: Claudette Barius / Warner Bros.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh — Screenplay by David Koepp.

Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi takes place around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, at which point our protagonist (Angela Childs, played by Zoë Kravitz), an agoraphobic tech worker, is struggling to even set foot outside of her apartment door. However, while reviewing the data stream of the titular virtual assistant Kimi (a la Alexa or Siri), Angela discovers evidence of what may have been a violent crime. But to get the evidence to the proper authorities she realizes that she will have to go outside. What she doesn’t know is that by reporting the recording to her company’s higher-ups she has effectively put a target on her back.

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