Sebastian review – journalist turned sex-worker aims to turn side-hustle into art

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Ruaridh Mollica is very good as Max, a freelance writer with a secret app life in prostitution, but Mikko Mäkelä’s film is not clear enough about his motivations Sex work as a window into human nature is a longstanding theme in cinema, from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, and onwards. It is intensified here by the fact that the protagonist Max (Ruaridh Mollica), who mines his side-hustle escort work for material, is also a writer. But this uneasy, self-regarding sophomore effort by Finnish-British director Mikko Mäkelä, never fully distancing itself from the narcissistic prism of artistic creation, only fleetingly makes contact with flesh-and-blood human truths. By day, Max is a freelance hotshot for London’s trendy Wall magazine; he has just bagged himself a sweet assignment to interview Bret Easton Ellis. By night he is “Sebastian”, a hot commodity on an app called DreamyGuys. Typically servicing the older gentleman, he turns his experiences...
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Magazine Dreams review – Jonathan Majors is a marvel in bruising bodybuilder drama

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Sundance film festival: there are overly familiar shades of Taxi Driver and Joker in this grim character study lifted by a sensational central performance

It’s not hard to understand why Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) has anger issues. He’s working a low-paid job, living with and caring for his ailing grandfather, enduring micro- and macro-aggressions as a Black man in America and as he explains to a court-appointed therapist in the opening scene, he’s trapped in one of the country’s many food deserts, raging at a system that forces working-class people to eat themselves to death. And then there’s his primary passion …

Killian is an amateur bodybuilder, pushing his body to extremes in order to do something that he can be remembered by, something to be respected for, a way to separate himself from the trail of violence left behind by his late father. So he lifts and eats and lifts and injects and lifts and competes and lifts and punishes himself in order to ultimately be rewarded.

Magazine Dreams premiered at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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