Joey’s Home Movies For the Week of June 27th – Fall Back in Love With ‘The Worst Person in the World’ (On Criterion)

Welcome back to my Home Movies! Today, The Worst Person in the World immediately joins the Criterion Collection. Need I say more? What else is hitting shelves this week, besides that brilliant top pick? Read on to find out…

Joey’s Top Pick

The Worst Person in the World

One of my favorite films of 2021, The Worst Person in the World is about as good as cinema gets. Renate Reinsve is a revelation, the movie was a highlight of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, and it just lingers in your mind. There’s a reason this has gone straight to Criterion. The Collection will say their piece below, but take it from me, this is an absolute gem. My interview with Reinsve is here, but this is some of my rave review out of TIFF:

This is why you go to a film festival. Sure, the buzz for The Worst Person in the World was strong out of the Cannes Film Festival, but seeing is believing. Not only is this movie a revelatory experience, it’s the cream of the 2021 crop so far. I fell in love with it and you will too, I can all but assure you of that. This is a gloriously funny, moving, sexy, and smart romantic dramedy that subverts all expectations. Occasionally quickly, but packing a major wallop by the end, it’s a full meal. Nothing at the Toronto International Film Festival so far has come close to matching it. Frankly, I was left stunned.

The Worst Person in the World instantly stands among the best romantic comedies of this recent age. At the same time, even referring to it as one is a disservice, as this is doing something very different. We haven’t seen this protagonist displayed in this manner on screen yet. Meeting her here, you’ll wonder how we went this long without it.

Also Available This Week

The A-Team: The Complete Series (TV)

American Pickle

Ascension

Charlotte

Fantastic Beasts: 3-Film Collection

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

Firestarter

Mothering Sunday

Criterion Corner

Pink Flamingos

From The Criterion Collection: “John Waters made bad taste perversely transcendent with the forever shocking counterculture sensation Pink Flamingos, his most infamous and daring cinematic transgression. Outré diva Divine is iconic as the wanted criminal hiding out with her family of degenerates in a trailer outside Baltimore while reveling in her tabloid notoriety as the “Filthiest Person Alive.” When a pair of sociopaths (Mink Stole and David Lochary) with a habit of kidnapping women in order to impregnate them attempt to challenge her title, Divine resolves to show them and the world the true meaning of the word “filth.” Incest, cannibalism, shrimping, and film history’s most legendary gross-out ending—Waters and his merry band of Dreamlanders leave no taboo unsmashed in this gleefully subversive ode to outsiderhood, in which camp spectacle and pitch-black satire are wielded in an all-out assault on respectability.”

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The Worst Person in the World

From The Criterion Collection: “Renate Reinsve won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for the revelatory, complex performance that anchors this sprawlingly novelistic film by Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier, an emotionally intricate and exhilarating character study of a woman entering her thirties. Amid the seemingly endless possibilities of the modern world, Julie (Reinsve) wavers over artistic passions and professions, the question of motherhood, and relationships with two very different men: a successful comic-book artist (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie) and a charismatic barista (Herbert Nordrum). Working with a team of longtime collaborators, Trier and his perennial cowriter Eskil Vogt construct in The Worst Person in the World, the Oscar-nominated third entry in their unofficial Oslo Trilogy, a liberating portrait of self-discovery and a bracingly contemporary spin on the romantic comedy.”

Stay tuned for more next week…