LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THIS WILDLY ORIGINAL, DEEPLY MOVING, TRULY TRANSCENDENT FILM!

Kajillionaire is funny, original, sad and singular. In other words, it's Peak Miranda July...Bleak and funny and still, somehow, flickering with hope (kinda like life)...It's rare for a film to feel so rich, so unique and so completely the sum of its parts, but July's third feature manages that feat...There are aspects of this film that remind me of 'The Royal Tenenbaums' with its dark, subversive humor, headed up by Richard Jenkins, who plays a perfect scoundrel. All four main characters are well fleshed out and quite quirky...The chemistry between Rodriguez and Wood is undeniable...this is definitely one you haven't seen before... Kajillionaire might be Miranda July's most accessible and rewarding film...Told with compassion, insight, nuance, and care,July's latest film is quick to steal your heart and win your love...Kajillionaire is about growing up, a painful, awkward, everyday love story, but no one tells it like Miranda July...a rumination on the complexities of parent-child relationships, on nurture, on how voids, once recognized, can always be filled... July challenges the regular ways of telling a story, and she succeeds in making movies that are uniquely hers...Evan Rachel Wood makes Old Dolio the beating heart of Kajillionaire, a story that derives its emotional stability from a character whose parents were never emotional or stable with her...Kajillionaire is a true master class on quirk, a dark comedy that frequently oscillates between laugh out loud and squirm in your seat...She presents characters who appear ripped from a realm slightly askew from ours, but as you live with them, you realize they're very much the products of our world....It's smart, original and just out there enough to be both profound and wacko...An original, bittersweet and unforgettable comedy about the meaning of family and the fears that keep us from finding our true selves. Evan Rachel Wood is brilliant...Kajillionaire dives into the inherent loneliness that comes with being treated as an adult your entire life and how family dynamics can affect so much of the people we become...Delivers several quintessentially July-ian scenes of astounding, unique power...July has managed to balance the outlandish and the everyday...The film's sparkiest revelation is Rodriguez, almost spectacularly charming and skilled as an ingénue schemer with more life experience than she's letting on...the oddball family dramedy is fundamentally about what it means to re-parent one's self as an adult...An outlandish movie that gradually creeps into your heart to firmly plant its ideas of longing and love...Oddities abound in July's gently absurdist films; you either roll with it or not. But when you give in, you go through them childlike, experiencing real and surreal together... deep down, what July offers here is a tender and moving story about love and our needs for connection, with a phenomenal performance from Wood...The film continues July's exploration of connection, and the yearning for intimacy, upending and queering the myth of family while exploring possibilities for those cut adrift from society's norms...With her tart-sweet worldview and keen sense of the ridiculous, filmmaker Miranda July spins straw into tender threads of gold...A quirky and peculiar film whose aesthetic surface masks a deeply moving emotional core...Crushing, hilarious and hopeful...This is a bold, bonkers movie with a warm, beating heart...Kajillionaire is simply the magic of cinema...Miranda July's films are miniature fairytales played out of tune - whimsical and sweet, with a tartness right at their centre...Kajillionaire is poignant yet funny, a dead-pan comedy drama about the poison of families, understanding intimacy and coming of age. It's also the love story of the year... July keeps things marvelously off-kilter here with plenty of oddball details, but these never compromise the compassion the film has for its characters, whose errant ways are, happily, not entirely irredeemable...There is a point where you sit back and try and realize what this woman is actually going through. Not only is she discovering who she is away from her parents, but what her life was like with them..."Kajillionaire" is a rich piece of storytelling, and it feels like a kajillion bucks...Kajillionaire is, in some ways, a coming-of-age movie, but it eschews the typical glow-up for an internal reckoning that's years overdue. The result is a grown-up growing-up movie, and a deep and moving catharsis for viewers...Ms. Wood is astonishing as Old Dolio, hiding herself under her long hair and mismatched tracksuit, expressing her unhappiness through the most extraordinary physicality...The movie has things to say about parenting, romance, capitalism and the therapeutic value of trying to repair the past...Completely original and eccentric..also surprisingly touching. The acting is top-notch and the writing is even better... Part of the film's success is due to Wood's absolute commitment to her character's emotional desperation...This is the rare talent of Miranda July: she whisks you up in a sweet world, and drops you from 10,000 feet before you have time to process how it's shattered you into a million pieces...I was awash in the profundity of a movie subtly reaching beyond its serendipitous musings... Kajillionaire feels like a breath of giddily intoxicating air - a film as silly as it is sad, as romantic as it is cynical...I enjoyed every single second of it...Not quite a critique of the adorable whimsy of her early work, Kajillionaire is a head-on encounter with the psychic tensions that always undergirded it...It's one eccentric comedy, cult heroine July's best movie yet, and there's real moral tension in Melanie's campaign to save Old Dolio from her self-serving parents...Kajillionaire has come along at just the right moment, infusing the modern cinema world with a moving, hilarious and truly original work of art...Old Dolio (whose very name, it's explained, is residue of a long-ago con) is a perfect vessel for July's thoughts on identity, and Wood captures the character's confusion and awkward attempts at liberation with soul and spunk...Evan Rachel Wood simultaneously conveys street wisdom and na?veté with a fluidity that's nothing short of masterful...the beating heart of the tale that will keep you watching is a wonderfully deadpan Wood...It's a really weird movie, but also a really sweet and human one...You cannot apply ordinary logic to a Miranda July movie...Miranda July's latest Tales from the Quirky Side is an almost magically eccentric portrait of longing and lowlife grifting...Kajillionaire is a movie about love, and loneliness, and it's funny and bittersweet and beautiful...Wood's performance is remarkable, as she crafts a character who could easily descend into dull parody and imbues her with a luminous, captivating quality I can't define...one of the best films of 2020...Beneath the surface quirks, this sharply observed portrait of con artists living on the socioeconomic margins uses strong performances to keep the material emotionally grounded...The more time one spends in July's world, the more weirdly charming it becomes...Bit by bit, line by line, [July] nudges you onto her characters' wavelength, navigating their world with matter-of-fact drollery and tethering even her weirdest flights of fancy to clear, accessible emotions... weirdness aside, you may even find yourself feeling something for Old Dolio, a young woman who can't con anyone out of what she really needs: Love and acceptance...The real magic of Kajillionaire is an addictively poignant performance from Gina Rodriguez...This theater of the absurd with lessons how not to be a family is hard not to like. Writer Director July Miranda creates a dramedy that is alternately infuriating, befuddling and unnerving, but uniquely creative...Now more than ever, when human connection is met with a risk warning, this arthouse indie comedy feels like a warm, much-needed hug...This is July at her best yet. Contains just the right amount of quirkiness, a sprinkle of absurd and a story that will melt hearts..."Kajillionaire" is a ferociously sharp-minded movie about parents and children, about families and their bonds, about family unity and its place in the world... The way July is able to juggle both the slyly cruel circumstances and the genuinely heartfelt transformation makes this her best work yet: a fractured mirror fable broken into perfect pieces... Kajillionaire has its undeniable quirks in terms of story and character, but its melancholy but hopeful heart beats louder... In a role without a ton of dialogue, Wood packs her hardest punch yet as Old Dolio. You both sympathize with her situation while wondering what is trapped beneath the hood...I've heard "Kajillionaire" described as a coming-of-age movie, which doesn't seem quite right. It's more like a coming-alive movie, and a gorgeous one at that...Kajillionaire may actually by July's most accessible film yet in terms of a heist/con man-based narrative, but there's still nothing quite like it in presentation...A meditation on the philosophy of relationships, parent-to-child & friend-to-friend ... funny, exasperating, even scary at times, but it purely entertains in a thoughtful way...The film hits July's sweet spot: gawky introverts struggling to find, accept and maintain human connections...has much to share on the camouflaged ways of familial abuse and the healing power of love...Finds warmth in the strangest places...Funny, poignant and ultimately triumphant, "Kajillionaire" is a precarious balancing act, one that July pulls off with astute writing, careful staging and trust in her actors...July's most profoundly moving work to date...In its quizzical, candy-colored, sideways view of the world - one that normalizes apartments that regularly flood with pink sludge - the film is offering a challenge to its audience...With this strange, dark dramedy, July reminds us that walls can never retain the softest parts of ourselves yearning to break free...It's endlessly imaginative and eternally wistful, alive with characters you might run into at a hipster coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard and bustling with women rarely seen on screen...Blending the treacherous class subjugation of Parasite with the offbeat anti-cool of Napoleon Dynamite, Kajillionaire peddles in social alienation..."Kajillionaire" is hyperbolic and surreal, but also, with July's unique touch, sweet...Nature versus nurture has never been so sorrowful yet absurd, Kajillionaire is a bitter yet glittering slice-of-life...The movie makes you laugh and breaks your heart at the same time...precise in how it examines slippery emotional terrain...An audaciously engaging, eccentrically original, surprisingly charming L.A. story that walks a delicate line between humor and heartache...Miranda July's Kajillionaire is a beautiful, well-told story with incredible performances wrapped in a warm blanket...Something profound is lurking just beneath the uncomfortably antisocial behaviors, the continual trickery, and abuse...Watch as [Evan Rachel Wood] walks behind Jenkins and Winger like an Emirati wife, head down but fingers flying towards any pay phone coin return that crosses her path, her entire body language like a magician's misdirection...July uses "Kajillionaire" to present her credentials as a transcendentalist of the humdrum...A beautifully bizarre film whose considerable strangeness allows for sharp observations about family, loneliness and the terror of emotional intimacy, Kajillionaire is further proof of writer-director Miranda July's ability to bend reality to her will...This film was an extremely weird breath of fresh air...there's a simplicity to the story in Kajillionaire that makes this the most grounded and straightforward of [July's] films to date...Kajillionaire is a remarkable film, simply beautiful and heart-warming. Created with love, and with the considerable talents of Miranda July and her actors, this is the very definition of a must see...Beyond the hilarious crime-family shenanigans, Kajillionaire is a story about broken people coming together to feel whole......miraculous, profound, and refreshingly bizarre... Uplifting and charming, Kajillionaire has a lot of original, insightful things to say about the world we all live in...Kajillionaire carries plenty of rewards for those who are willing to succumb to Miranda July's particular set of skills...Miranda July continues to explore the strange beauty of human connection through her unique blend of quirk, comedy, and pathos...It's the kind of tale Miranda July specializes in... another distinctive, funny, gently sympathetic portrait of people who are poorly suited for society, but condemned to live in it anyway...Most directors not named David Lynch wouldn't be able to handle just one of these aforementioned surreal elements - they'd either overplay it, or underplay it - but July effectively immerses us in this defiantly unpredictable world...A prickly little gem by a singular artist... Ever since her letter-based performance work "Joanie 4 Jackie," July has explored the emotional currency of communication, and those themes remain potent here...In the end, "Kajillionaire" is less about the con than it is the connection, and we're all the richer as a result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiMPCevu8Wk