REVIEW: Gagarine [2021]

We’re dying here. Being the first man to travel into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s name became a global commodity. Even a housing project within a communist municipality outside of Paris took it as its moniker and invited the hero to come by and receive the cheers of the French people gathering outside on their balconies for a look. That was 1963, however. A complex possessing 370 apartments like Cité Gagarine was destined to take a beating once infrastructure and economics collided. Its disrepair cemented an eventual demolition by 2014; its…

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REVIEW: The French Dispatch [2021]

Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose. I’m not sure you can get a more unadulterated shot to the vein of Wes Anderson than his quasi-anthology film The French Dispatch. Born from his own mind (and that of frequent collaborators Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, and Jason Schwartzman) with a healthy dose of inspiration taken from his adoration of The New Yorker, this self-proclaimed love letter to journalism set abroad in France proves to be the perfect venue for the auteur to distill his…

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