The Killing of a Sacred Deer Slaughters Normalcy With It's Depraved Farcical Storytelling. That's A Compliment.

If you saw 2016's excellent dark comedy The Lobster, then you're fully aware how much writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos loves to weave tales heavy on weirdness and people committing ever-escalating acts of depravity in the service of an extended metaphor. He keeps that spirit very much alive for his newest movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which is akin to The Lobster as well as last year's The Square in terms of being a dark comedy that keeps daring the audience to look away from the various hideous acts occuring on-screen. So utterly unconventional is The Killing of a Sacred Deer that I imagine writers Yorgo Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou started their first writing session with this simple statement:

Spirited Endurance Makes Up The Backbone Of The Enjoyable Their Finest

I'm sure you, whilst walking out of Dunkirk two months back,  thought to yourself "Wow, a whole movie about the Dunkirk evacuation! I wonder, are there any other recent movies covering that subject matter?" Turns out, there was another motion picture this year all about the Dunkirk evacuations, albeit Their Finest covers what happened after that massive evacuation effort. Specifically, it's about some British film executives wanting to create a film based on events from the Dunkirk evacuation that can help inspire the war-weary masses both in England and in countries abroad, specifically America.

Insomnia Has A Great Robin Williams Performance And Some Overly Predictable Elements

Compared to other entries in Christopher Nolan's filmography, Insomnia can't help but feel a bit routine in execution. Now, the film overall is actually pretty entertaining, a well-done cat-and-mouse crime thriller with one particularly strong performance I'll talk about later, but compared to the narrative audaciousness of fellow Nolan movies Dunkirk or Memento and even just considered on its own merits, Insomnia feels more paint-by-numbers in concept and execution of said concept. But even paint-by-numbers can be plenty fine when the paint looks pretty and Insomnia most certainly has some super colorful elements that help stand out.

Dunkirk Is An Incredible War Movie That Goes All-In On Uniqueness

Dunkirk very much does not rest on the laurels of convention in many key aspects of how it chooses to tell the real life story of the World War II rescue mission called the Dunkirk Evacuation. One expects ambition from Christopher Nolan's work at this point, with it mostly paying off for him as a filmmaker while his weaker movies (the still really good The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar) being remarkably admirable in their audaciousness, but kinda like how Edgar Wright demonstrated he could do gangster movies with the same sense of brilliant energy and creativity that he had with his comedy with last month's Baby Driver, Nolan uses his sense of ambition on Dunkirk to chart new territory for himself as a filmmaker. Both in the pantheon of his filmography and as a movie in its own right, Dunkirk really does cement itself as something special.