In Leslye Headland's "Cult of Love," we witness a spectacle of familial self-destruction – a Christmas Eve family dinner. Like Sartre's iconic play "No Exit," but with red wine and Christmas carols, Headland has crafted a domestic inferno where the torturers are wearing festive sweaters and speaking in passive-aggressive Christian platitudes.

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The parallels with Sartre's existentialist masterpiece are impossible to ignore, though the stark metaphysical setting in Sartre’s play is traded for a New England farmhouse decorated like a Pottery Barn catalog. In Sartre’s play, 3 family members die and go to hell, and at first are pleasantly surprised at how he’ll looks like a nice bourgeois living room. But then slowly it dawns on them that they are trapped together in this room for eternity, with no exit. It is the source of Sartre's famous phrase "Hell is other people", a reference to Sartre's ideas about the look and the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an ob…

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There's something perfectly American about taking the single greatest atrocity in human history and turning it into a real estate development opportunity.

If you want to understand everything wrong with contemporary American culture, look no further than Brady Corbet's "The Brutalist," a film that manages to be both heavy-handed and somehow still not heavy-handed enough. The movie follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who arrives in America only to discover that he left the concentration camps….for another brutalizing prison system  - the American Dream.

Tóth, fresh off the boat at Ellis Island with a nasty morphine habit and haunted memories, finds himself in Philadelphia, that most American of cities, designing furniture for his assimilated cousin's store. It's here we get our first taste of the film's fascination with the aesthetics of compromise. The cousin has traded his Jewish identity for a Catholic persona that's as hollow as the mass-produced furniture he sells. As Laszlo quips: “it says ‘Miller & Sons’ on the door but there is no Miller and no sons”. The American dream, it seems, requires a kind of spiritual self-lobotomy.

Enter Van Buren (Guy Pearce, channeling the WASP-y menace of American capitalism), an industrialist who commissions Tóth to build a "community center" - that beloved euphemism of liberal do-gooderism, in

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