The Triptych of Mondongo review – one part art documentary, two parts directorial megalomania

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What begins as a portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo snowballs into Mariano Llinás’s infuriatingly brilliant farrago of colour, conflict and existential crisis About as inside-baseball for visual arts as you can get, Mariano Llinás’s three-part portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo is knackering, infuriating and, infuriatingly, often brilliant – especially in its more sincere second instalment. The film nominally tries to document Mondongo’s 2021 Baptistery of Colours project , in which the artists catalogued the chromatic spectrum with plasticine blocks inside a dodecahedron chapel. But it quickly snowballs into Llinás’s own scattershot inquiry into colour and portraiture, a tone poem that ceaselessly interrogates its own tones, a crisis of faith about representation, and – as he falls out with artists Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha – a droll depiction of a director’s nervous breakdown. As Laffitte lets fly at him at one point, Llinás can never resist the...
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‘Who doesn’t think they’re an outsider?’ David Fincher on hitmen, ‘incels’ and Spider-Man’s ‘dumb’ origin story

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The director is one of Hollywood’s most unpredictable film-makers. He discusses making a shamelessly pulpy ‘B-movie’, the misogynistic legacy of Fight Club – and the urge to film 100 takes

For anyone who thought David Fincher’s last film, Mank, was the beginning of a new highbrow phase for the director, his latest offering will be something of a jolt. Whereas Mank – on the writing of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane – was a sumptuous, substantial, awards-friendly hymn to old Hollywood (it was nominated for 10 Oscars and won two), his new film, The Killer, is a pulpy, violent, almost wilfully two-dimensional hitman thriller adapted from a comic book. “I will never be a more mature film-maker. I will carry the 12-year-old me with me wherever I go,” he says proudly.

Rather than growing up, it looks like Fincher is having fun – albeit in a highly controlled, Fincheresque way. He is in a particularly relaxed mode when we meet at a hotel in London. He looks healthy and he is full of wit and energy, almost as if this isn’t the umpteenth interview he has done in his 40-year career.

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