RESURRECTION (2025)

Undeniably ambitious, but I felt like I spent half the runtime trying to get on this film's wavelength. The grand metaphor about the Death of Cinema is pretty sentimental, and electing to enact that metaphor through an extremely handwavey science-fiction conceit is pretty silly. And the best segments of this film are, frankly, the ones where this metaphor and this conceit both get pushed to the back seat for a while. For instance, the unbroken-shot New Year's Eve segment is audacious enough that I could forget the scaffolding and just enjoy it, and it would have felt remarkable as a standalone film—but then when it gets fit back in to the overall contraption of the film's Big Goings-On it feels like it gets cheated out of some of the room it needed to breathe. Same goes for the segment with the monk and the spirit, and the segment with the con-artist and the orphan—either of those stories might have sustained entire features, and both might have benefitted from a little extra air. (And the segments that rely the most on the Big Conceit—the needlessly convoluted noirish one and the faux-German Expressionist opener—really do feel burdened beyond the point of salvage.)

I don't think this wants to be thought of as just an "anthology film" but in the end I'm not sure that this avoids the trap that a lot of anthology films fall into: some of it is good, some of it is bad, the device that contrives to hold it all together shows signs of being a contrivance. Worth the watch and it gets better as it goes along, but I think some of the exuberant praise for this oversells it.

A ★★★ review of Resurrection (2025)

Undeniably ambitious, but I felt like I spent half the runtime trying to get on this film’s wavelength. The grand metaphor about the Death of Cinema is pretty sentimental, and electing to enact that metaphor through an extremely handwavey science-fiction conceit is pretty silly. And the best segments of this film are, frankly, the ones where this metaphor and this conceit both get pushed to the back seat for a while. For instance, the unbroken-shot New Year’s Eve segment is audacious enough that I could forget the scaffolding and just enjoy it, and it would have felt remarkable as a

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