Second viewing, and the latest case for grasping festival reviews (or at least *my* festival reviews) as fundamentally first impressions. This film has pretty much lived and flourished in my mind ever since I saw it, at Cannes 2018, and finally revisiting it confirms my growing suspicion that I massively underrated it. My major issue back then was a general discomfort with being asked to sympathize with an emotionally unstable cop with resentment towards his ex-wife. Which now strikes me…

Double meanings of a double life: an ingenious con-artist thriller that's also about the desperate loneliness of playing rich and straight, respectively. Does Matt Damon do his best work as men faking their way to high society? It's a theme that resonates at least superficially with his movie-star backstory as an ordinary dude from Bahstan, and which finds its own double in The Departed, another con artist story of sorts, featuring a (possibly closeted) character self-actualizing up the ladder through…