Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under the pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.
May December is a sharp, audacious meta-melodrama that dissects celebrity, trauma, and performance with uncommon intelligence. Todd Haynes constructs a deliberately overripe melodrama-within-a-melodrama, and the script by Samy Burch is one of the most layered and provocative of its year. Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore deliver career-highlight performances, playing off each other in ways that blur predator, victim, and observer. The film's novelty is exceptional — it weaponizes Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk influences while engaging in genuinely cutting commentary on how abuse gets aestheticized and commodified. The ending, while thematically coherent, is somewhat deliberately anticlimactic in a way that not all viewers will find satisfying, keeping it from the highest tier. Cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt is competent and occasionally inspired but not the film's defining strength.