Levi on Film

“I Saw the TV Glow,” 2024, directed by Jane Schoenbrun ★★★★ ★ It’s hard to overstate what an exciting moment in time it is to witness the true beginning of Jane Schoenbrun’s career. Their debut feature, "We’re All Going to the World’s Fair", is fascinating as a unique piece of internet-infused horror filmmaking that begged to be peeled back and examined. "World’s Fair", though, was limited by its minimal budget and its vague subject matter in a way that made it more inscrutably personal despite its emotional evocations. While "I Saw the TV Glow" still captures Schoenbrun’s unique brand of eerie unreality, it expands on "World’s Fair"’s ideas exponentially and presents them in ways filmgoers have never seen on this scale. There are traces of a lot of other filmmakers here—Schoenbrun has been open about their inspiration from David Lynch, which shows, and audiences will likely find themselves drawing a number of comparisons to David Cronenberg’s ...

“The Zone of Interest,” 2023, directed by Jonathan Glazer ★★★★ ★ It’s hard to know what to expect from " The Zone of Interest" when watching it for the first time. It’s a “Holocaust movie” – a loaded phrase that, in itself, implies undue dramatization, exploitation, and sterilization of a genocide. " Schindler's List " , " T he Boy in the Striped Pajamas " , and " Life is Beautiful" have all seen their fair share of criticism, and rightly so; there’s something insidious about using the real-life death of millions as a basis for entertainment. So when audiences first sit down to watch “ The Zone of Interest” , they may be appropriately skeptical. " The Zone of Interest" , however, isn’t designed to entertain. It feels bad to watch. There’s not even a traditional narrative structure – just a series of vignettes, seen from afar, obscuring and implying the most ghastly crimes behind a large, cement wall. The wall divides the infamous A...