Movie Reviews

‘It’s Not Me’ Review: Leos Carax’s Cinema Collage Mixes Movies, History and Real Life into a Personal Manifesto

Published

2 years ago

May 18, 2024

‘It’s Not Me’ Review: Leos Carax’s Cinema Collage Mixes Movies, History and Real Life into a Personal Manifesto

After Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax is probably the French filmmaker most associated with the term enfant terrible. In some ways, he’s been even more terrible than Godard ever was, adopting a pseudonym (he was born Alex Dupont) as a teenager and bursting onto the scene at age 24 with Boy Meets Girl — Godard made Breathless when he was 30 — which immediately turned him into a major young auteur to be reckoned with.

He followed that up with the powerful, AIDS-inspired Mauvais Sang, and then made The Lovers on the Bridge, a film infamous for being a French Heaven’s Gate that went way over budget and flopped (it’s still a fantastic movie). After that Carax disappeared for a while, then reemerged to make a few shorts, compose pop songs and shoot a new feature every decade, the last one being the Adam Driver-Marion Cotillard starrer, Annette.

It’s Not Me

The Bottom Line

A short and dense film autobiography suited for the auteur’s fans.

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Première)
Cast: Denis Lavant, Nastya Golubeva Carax, Anna-Isabel Siefken, Bianca Maddaluno, Kateryna Yuspina, Loreta Juodkaite, Peter Anevskii
Director, screenwriter, editor: Leos Carax

40 minutes

His latest work, the medium-length, autobiographical collage It’s Not Me (C’est pas moi), is both that of an enfant terrible and a true-blooded Godard disciple. It mimics, or pays homage to, the late Franco-Swiss director’s montage films like Histoire(s) du cinéma and The Image Book, using the same colorful on-screen titles that JLG once used to comment on footage both old and new.

That footage was assembled by Carax for an exhibition meant to happen at the Pompidou Center a few years ago, but still yet to take place. (Back in 2006, Godard was asked to do his own show at the same museum, then abandoned it due to “artistic, financial and technical difficulties,” only to replace it several months later with what was best described as a “non-exhibition.“)

In preparation for the show, the organizers ask Carax a simple question: Who are you? The answer, according to It’s Not Me, it that he’s everything from silent movies to Hollywood Golden Age classics to scenes from his own work. He’s also the music of Nina Simone and David Bowie and The Fall, as well as Ravel and Beethoven. He’s Monsieur Merde (Mister Shit), a raving alter-ego played by Denis Lavant, who’s starred in nearly all of his films. And he’s above all a person who defines himself through the cinema, whether it’s the movies he loves or those he’s made throughout his turbulent career.

People unfamiliar with Carax’s oeuvre will likely be lost here, while fans and cinephiles will find a hearty meal to feast on. It’s Not Me is chock-full of references and influences, from F.W. Murnau to Jean Vigo to Godard himself, whose trembling voice is heard on a voice message he once left the director.

There are also scenes featuring Carax’s real family, including his daughter, the actress Nastya Golubeva Carax, whom we see skipping along the Seine in old cell phone footage, then marvelously playing piano in a scene illuminated by candles. The auteur himself appears a few times as well: at the very start, where he’s lying on something like his deathbed, and later walking through the Buttes-Chaumont park accompanied by Monsieur Merde, who gleefully runs down a hill and defecates in a bush.

The film jumps around so quickly that it’s sometimes hard to follow the director’s lead. At other moments Carax more succinctly expresses his views, such as in a rapid-fire montage of world leaders that groups together Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-il and Benjamin Netanyahu. Another scene provides a brief history of Roman Polanski’s tumultuous and controversial life, in what seems like a plea for his defense.

While Carax’s movies have never been overtly political or historical, this one makes several references to Hitler and the Nazis. In one sequence, the director cuts in footage of Isadore Greenbaum, the Jewish plumber who tried to interrupt a pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden in 1939. In a later scene staged by Carax — and shot by cinematographer Caroline Champetier, the DP of Holy Motors — a mother sits beside her children in bed, eerily reading a bedtime story that describes the Final Solution.

Again, it’s a hearty meal, and also a condensed one at only 40 minutes. The auteur seems to be squeezing everything he can into a personal manifesto in which cinema, history and real life become interchangeable, and in which he tries to situate his work within film’s larger trajectory. The most telling evidence of this is a sequence which cuts from Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering photos of a horse in movement to a tracking shot of Lavant gloriously running and dancing down a Paris street in Mauvais Sang.

At such moments, it’s clear that Carax has not only reserved his own place in cinema’s trajectory, but that his films remain instantly recognizable through their romantic exuberance and visual splendor, their dark humor and existential gloom. These traits may not describe who Carax is or wants to be — if one is to believe that his latest movie is not, in fact, him (c’est pas moi). But they’re what we know and love about a great filmmaker, and still very much an enfant terrible at age 63, who’s always put the whole of himself into his work.

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Movie Reviews

1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy

Published

3 hours ago

May 9, 2026

Press Room

1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy

by Sean P. Aune | May 9, 2026

Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.

We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.

Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.

The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.

This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.

Dangerously Close

I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.

An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?

The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.

Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.

Fire with Fire

Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.

Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.

This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’

Last Resort

Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.

George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.

There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.

Short Circuit

Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?

NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.

Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.

His whole character is mystifying.

Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.

1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: AFFECTION – Assignment X

Published

15 hours ago

May 9, 2026

Press Room

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026

AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.

There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.

Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.

But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.

The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.

Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.

Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.

The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?

AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.

Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.

We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.

As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.

Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.

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Movie Reviews

8News Reel Talk: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ movie review

Published

1 day ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

8News Reel Talk: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ movie review

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, digital producer Julia Broberg is joined by anchor Deanna Allbrittin and reporter Allison Williams to talk about “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”

The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:

Deanna: ★★★★.5

Allison: ★★★.25

Julia: ★★

To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC+ Originals page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.