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Sean Baker is the most effective anti-fairytale fairytale teller working in cinema today.

My small piece of advice to any aspiring first time filmmaker. If you want an instant and budget efficient way to give your first short or feature a style, study Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley. Specifically the limits they put on themselves in of the look of their films. The more limits you put on your look the more style you are likely to achieve. Limit movement of the camera, for example. Or cutting to close ups. Choose one lens size to shoot your whole film.

If I’m not mistaken, in Mystery Train, I think Jarmusch has made the deliberate choice to limit showing his protagonists in singles. And if he does they are never in closeup and the blocking of the actors often leads to the single without the use of a cut. When he very rarely cuts away to a single he usually does so without resorting to talking head close ups in shot/reverse shot. 

You combine the interesting time structure Jarmusch employs along with the self imposed visual limitations he and his brilliant cinematographer Robby Mueller impose on themselves and you have a film that is a Spartan masterpiece in the use of tableau.

When I was watching the Criterion 4K for this last night two obvious autobiographical films came to mind: 8 1/2 and All That Jazz. Is Jo Jo Dancer at the level of those films? No, but it’s a bold and brave edition to that canon. As many have commented on here, the ending kind of fizzles out, but this was a great example of self-examination by one of the true comic geniuses of the last century. And it’s always a pleasant surprise when a major studio, in this case, Columbia, greenlights a warts and all biopic like this. Not something any of them would be interested in now. I can imagine the meetings with executives on this one: “Yes Richard, but can it be more like The Toy? Does it have to be so depressing?”

When one thinks of Fellini, albeit in a completely shallow and stereotypical way, one thinks of fantasias of whimsy with a penchant for the bizarre, so if one hasn’t seen La Dolce Vita in a long time, one forgets just how far below the depths of cynicism, depravity and gloom the Maestro is capable of going in order to make his point about modern life in Rome circa 1960.

The scene in which a very sickly Mozart composes his Requiem in D minor while Salieri transposes it with a mixture of awe and revenge on the tip of his tongue is a masterclass in how to show the creative process on film. Something that sounds easy to do, but is often very boring to watch. Especially in the hands of lesser filmmakers.

The perfect cocktail of masculinity, bravado, tenderness and poignance. A cocktail which has such specific parts, that if a drop here or a drop there is misplaced the whole thing would fall apart. THIS is a 5 star masterpiece for the skill at which all involved make this impossible perfect cocktail shot after shot after shot; beat after beat after beat until the final ride off into the sunrise.

If you would’ve asked me which of the Before films I liked more back in 2004 I would’ve said Sunrise for sure, but in 2025 the older I get the more Sunset and Midnight resonate with me. And that’s the genius of both this series and Linklater’s Boyhood. The ability to be able to experience the progression of people in 5-10 year gaps of time in a single sitting is so invaluable. It really puts aging and the wisdom that comes with it into such a crystal clear prospective, because our own aging processes are so gradual. The patience and foresight it took Linklater and his actors to achieve this is a gift to us all.

The clash between D.W. Griffith’s Victorian style of melodrama and his absolutely revolutionary (at the time) filmic techniques is so mind bending that I may have to add Intolerance to my list of Psychedelic Films. Even one of the film’s subtitles “A Sun-Play of the Ages” suggests some kind of mind altering experience.

There is a shocking amount of pro-union left wing politics in the modern story as a Rockefeller-esque factory owner breaks up a strike with machine gunned clad thugs. This political stance, combined with the revelatory filmic techniques Griffith was using was cat nip to the Russian Filmmasters like Eisenstein and Pudovkin. It’s no wonder they ran their print of Intolerance so often that the emulsion was completely stripped off. They bowed at the feet of this artist and took his principles to the next level. No Intolerance, no Odessa steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin and probably no Eisenstein as we know him. The extent to which the Russians were smitten with this film was so great, that V.I. Lenin himself approached Griffith to run the Russian film industry. 

The bold steps forward in cinema this film took in 1916 cannot be overstated. Cross-cutting between stories taking place in multiple eras is such a common trope today that we take it for granted, but in 1916 this was like capturing lightning in a bottle. And the fact that a man like Griffith, who was even in his time hopelessly old fashioned, had the fortitude and trust in his audience to try this revolutionary technique, is equally as mind bending. 

Nevertheless, the first praise you often hear for Intolerance is for its editing, but you don’t hear as much praise for its images. Griffith’s cinematographer Billy Bitzer was using light and composition on a masterful level that few silent film cameramen could ever dream of touching. Yes, Bitzer is credited with pioneering technical advancements such as the use of the close-up, back lighting, three point lighting and the use of artificial light to light a film, but look at the ethereal images this man achieved in Intolerance and you will find a cinematographer who is as relevant today as he was in 1916. Keep in mind that Intolerance is in the public domain, so there are varying versions available in of length, image quality and sound quality.  I watched the incredible 167 min Eureka! Masters or Cinema blu-ray version for this review, which I have to assume is the best version out there. 

A film of this scale was made for $385,907 in 1915 money, which = $12.3 million in today’s dollars. Can you imagine any filmmaker getting this kind of production value for $12 million today? Yes, I realize Brady Corbet made The Brutalist for $9.6 million, but he didn’t have to film to scale battle scenes, such as the fall of Babylon found here, in his film. Insane.

Hyperbolic that some called Intolerance "the only film fugue"? Or that Theodore Huff, one of the leading film critics of the first half of the 20th century, declared it the only motion picture worthy of taking its place alongside Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling paintings? I don’t think it is.

Another film, like Poor Things, that seems to be aesthetically inspired by Fassbinder’s Querelle, and I endorse this trend 1000%. Though the film is set in 1950, the brilliant choice to make the soundtrack mostly out of period songs gives Queer a timeless quality. Definitely in the genre of libertine white people going off to adventure in foreign lands, The Sheltering Sky, Naked Lunch and The Rum Diary come to mind. Luca Guadagnino has become one of the most interesting and dependable filmmakers working today. When he puts something out you can bet that that film will at the very least be an interesting take on its subject and will likely be a masterpiece.

Saw this tonight at The Beverly Hills Film Festival®. A movie that is invaluable for filmmakers and cinephiles worldwide. It focuses solely on Martin Scorsese’s revolutionary use of music in his films starting with Mean Streets and ending with the Departed and No Direction Home. What I learned from this film is that music and filmic rhythm are completely intertwined for this legendary filmmaker. From his upbringing in New York’s Little Italy, where disparate genres from classical, opera, jazz, R&B, Soul and Rock n’ Roll, wafted from open windows and spilled out onto the streets acting as a kind of soundtrack to the rhythm of life, Scorsese learned that music in and of itself is a primordial, almost preordained, part of the shadow play of cinema itself.  

The poster at the fest says this film is a part 1, because the footage was shot in 2006 by the filmmakers’ father, who ed away and never got to finish his film, but thankfully his daughters, Clara Kuperberg and Julia Kuperberg did. And I will be first in line to see part 2 which would cover Scorsese’s use Music from 2006-present.

The Substance 32 years before The Substance.

If you grew up in the 1980’s, this man needs no introduction. We lost one of the great chameleons yesterday. Val Kilmer. Just the name itself probably evokes one million images in your head from all the iconic characters he played. It didn’t matter if he was the lead in the film or a ing player, he ALWAYS left a mark. The films people are talking about today are Top Gun, Tombstone, Batman Forever, Willow, The Doors and Heat. All iconic films to be sure and the Doors happens to be my favorite music biopic ever, but don’t sleep on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Kill Me Again, Real Genius, Top Secret and The Salton Sea, two incredible bit roles in Pollock and True Romance and the poignant documentary Val. R.I.P. to one of the great screen acting artists of the last 40 years.

So it’s E.T. with the Universal Monsters instead of a space alien, cruder humor and more violence. Watching this again as an adult (for the first time since maybe the 1990’s) I see this parallel as clear as a bell.

I love that Kevin Smith has somehow simultaneously kept his lewd, sophomoric humor and gotten more mature. This was a fun time at the movies (pun intended). It isn’t a masterpiece by any means, but it is Smith’s most personal film. And certainly Smith’s goal of being the John Hughes of New Jersey comes through loud and clear in this one. There has been a quiet quality of product renaissance for Smith of late as Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III had no business being as good as they were. 

I when Clerks first hit theaters back in 1994. I loved its scrappy attempt at Jim Jarmusch meets Slacker. I was’t sure after Mallrats (which I saw in theaters then and hated as a followup to Clerks, but now I quite enjoy as both an artifact of its time and as movie of comic merit) that Smith would ever recover. He got back to his indie roots with Chasing Amy, which will always be his masterpiece and he’s had fits and starts ever since, yet here he is 30 years on, still making movies. The man survived a widow maker heart attack and had an existential crisis that landed him in a mental health institution where he sought intensive therapy and the first thing he did after that was make The 4:30 Movie. How can you not root for this guy?

Here is a major studio, Paramount, putting out a mid-budget film. $18 million. The kind that people seem to think major studios don’t touch anymore. It’s not that they don’t touch them, it’s that they still fall into either high concept comedy, horror or action films. A film like say, Scarecrow, which Warners put out in the 1970s or Crossing Delancy, which Warners put out in the 1980s, that is character studies, that don’t feature an everyman becoming an action hero because he happens to be born with a genetic disorder where he can’t feel pain, but feature regular people dealing with interesting situations in interesting ways, don’t exist in today’s major studio release slates. 

The plus here is some studios are still taking chances on original IP, but Novocaine still resembles the superhero/comic book paradigm. That in and of itself is not the reason I’m giving this 2.5 stars. The fact that the villains are cookie cutter and uninteresting, the lead character is 
uncharismatic and his actions and reactions to his extraordinary circumstances are inhuman and the screenplay has this annoying way of hitting its story beats in a completely emotionally pandering way is why I’m giving this 2.5 stars.

There is one extraordinary scene in Novocaine involving the subversion of the cinematic torture scene, that manages to reach a certain comedic transcendence, but all that did was make me long for what this film could’ve been in the hands of better filmmakers and a better script.

I mean. Come on. Like I wasn’t going to give this 5 stars? Please. My only criticism is with myself and how long it took me to finally see this. 

A very interesting juxtaposition between this story and Michel Hazanavicius‘ specific, French, iconoclastic, style. This is the man who after all
brought us The Artist and the OSS 117 series. Anybody who thinks Hazanavicius is 100% on the side of Godard’s dogmatic revolutionary attitude in this story is seriously mistaken. 

Hazanavicius throws in absurdisms throughout the film to express his less than brimming endorsement of his protagonist. A bit where Godard’s glasses keep breaking as a result of literal with the Revolution is a slow moving gag that builds to a laugh out loud point, and a bit where Godard, in a defiant act, glues his fingertips to obscure his fingerprints and gets paper stuck to his fingers as he madly flails to get them off is also hilarious. It’s a fascinating cinematic trick Hazanavicius pulls off here as he simultaneously writes a love letter to and a critique of Godard the filmmaker and the man. 

I can’t think of better casting than Louis Garrel as Godard, who, in The Dreamers, already portrayed a revolutionary student in the very same era Godard Mon Amour is set. And the more I see of Stacy Martin, who portrays Anne Wiazemsky here, the more I fall in love with her. Brady Corbet has used her in all three of his directed films. 

Reading up on Godard Mon Amour, I see a lot of hate on Letterboxd and other cinematic opinion collectives. Maybe people think it’s too carbon copy to a Godard film, but that’s both the point and precisely what is so impressive about this film. So I don’t get the hate. But as I’ve said in previous reviews, I have a personal bias towards films about film and in that genre Godard Mon Amour is one of the better examples.

When I worked at a cool little indie video store called 20/20 Video, in Studio City, CA, in the 1990’s, this was one of those videos we could not keep in the store. It would be constantly rented and never returned or outright stolen by every two bit junkie and hipster in the Valley. Reorder, repeat. Until it went out of print. 

This documentary is so my sweet spot. A late 1980’s L.A. set film, where smoking was still allowed in recording studios and Mexican restaurants, shot in out of time black & white, with appearances by Flea, Lisa Marie, Chris Isaak and Vigo Mortensen, which satiates my late 1980s alt music scene fetish. The interviews in this film are so nonchalant in the amazing lives these subjects lived, “At the time I was dating Terence Stamp on again, off again for 9 months. He was living with Michael Caine then,” quips one of Baker’s ex-wives and others are so nonchalantly raw and honest about this film’s subject, none so as raw than the main attraction himself, time, drug, cigarette, alcohol withered jazz legend Chet Baker. Most documentaries these days are so staged and sanitized: Let’s Get Lost is the antithesis. 

Fashion Photographer Bruce Weber directs this like a David Fincher Madonna video and I love him for it. Wait a minute, strike that, reverse it, Fincher directs Madonna videos like Bruce Weber directs Chet Baker documentaries. Weber gets Baker warts and all. The footage of him in the back of a car, stoned on one substance or another, flanked on each side by two young girls, asking him questions about life, where he seems to nod in and out of philosophical utterances, is at once full of deep sorrow and a kind of rich derelict elegance.

THE CORBET/FASTVOLD COLLABORATION (an opinion piece)

The picture is much clearer now that I’ve caught up with the pre-Brutalist films of the Brady Corbet/Mona Fastvold creative partnership in which Corbet directs (there are three others that Fastvold directs that I need to catch up with). I was in the dark and soured by my own biases based on reputation when it comes to, for lack of a better term, the “academic cinema” of these two artists. I’m hit or miss when it comes to this style, but the way Corbet/Fastvold have used this in all three of their collaborations is a hit for me. I still don’t think any of the three films Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux and the Brutalist, that this team has produced are 5 star masterpieces, but they have built their own lane and are the exclusive drivers in that lane. 

No artists working in cinema use the theme of trauma informing art quite like Corbet/Fastvold do. WWI and the Treaty of Versailles informs the fascist art project the main character in Childhood of a Leader embarks on; WWII and the Holocaust informs the career of architect László Tóth in the Brutalist and in Vox Lux; a school mass shooting informs the pop career of Natalie Portman’s Celeste. And through the absence of such characters in the real world: No Holocaust survivor became a world renowned architect; no school mass shooting survivor became a world renowned pop star; no American born child, who witnessed the birth of the Treaty of Versailles, became the leader of the European fascist movement of the 1930s; Corbet/Fostvald have pulled off a cinematic paradox that is quite mind boggling in the best possible way. 

Having their stories mimic reasonable facsimiles of actual people, without ever completely telling those people’s stories, is more than just “Film à clef” in their hands. It’s addition by subtraction. Or is it subtraction by addition? My only slight aversion to this very deliberate aesthetic choice is the occasional lack of human connection to the characters on screen. I made a short film in my first year at AFI that suffered from this same ailment. It was formally beautiful and filled with a central idea that I refused to stray from, but ultimately there was no human connection to the main characters. I’m in no way comparing myself to Corbet/Fostvald, because I find their films rather spellbinding, but I know for myself that exploring real emotional honesty on film can be daunting and even scary for the filmmaker, it’s sometimes easier to hide behind formalism than it is to embrace emotionalism. 

Of the three Corbet/Fosvald collaborations, the one that resonates most with me is Corbet’s directorial debut Childhood of a Leader. I found their specific collision of art and trauma in that film to be the most potent and the most connected to emotion. The Corbet/Fostvald collaboration is one of the most interesting cinematic collaborations working in film today and I can’t wait to see what the two come up with next.

The second Brady Corbet film I’ve seen besides The Brutalist and I see a lot of Jonathan Glazer in this one, specifically Birth, obviously this predates The Zone of Interest. As well as a lot of Lynne Ramsay, specifically We Need to Talk About Kevin. I don’t mean these comparisons as a pejorative. And now I see that the Brutalist, which keeps you at an opaque distance for much of the film, was baked into Corbet’s style from the start. This knowledge may open me up for a reappraisal of the Brutalist which I gave 3 stars. Didn’t hate it, didn’t love it as much as most.

I love this more compact and contained Corbet/Fastvold. Corbet/Fastvold seem to make very formal and intellectual films of ideas. Not necessarily a bad thing if used the right way, which usually requires a difficult tight wire act to pull off. For the Brutalist, there is an overarching theme of loss, as in a meditation on the loss of art the world suffered as a result of the Holocaust. The very point that the much renowned Brutalist architect László Tóth never actually existed is precisely the point. By seeing his successes and failures dramatized, we are meant to feel a longing for what could’ve been. That’s a very brilliant, but convoluted idea, that needs to work extremely hard to make its point. By subverting the very nature of story beats against the viewer, Corbet puts a lot of faith in the intelligence level of the viewer and for that and to the people who allow Corbet to tell such stories, without interference, I have much respect.

The metaphor presented in Childhood of a Leader works better for me than the one above. Having as a backdrop, the forming and g of the Treaty of Versailles, and all the public humiliation and degradation and future economic ruin that suffered as a result of it, drawing a direct line to the rise of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust; paralleling, informing and sometimes literally speaking to the story of a young American boy abroad, who is destined to grow up to be a monster (fill in whoever you want as an historical analog as there are many) is a potent method for telling this kind of story.

The filmmaking here is austere, but in a less obtrusive way than it was in The Brutalist. At age 25, Corbet’s age when he made this film, Childhood of a Leader has got to be one of the more audacious and impressive directorial debuts by a young filmmaker. The score by Scott Walker is exquisite and how that man never got any academy love is beyond me. I thank Corbet for championing him as a film composer while he was still with us. 

Now on to Vox Lux.

Woody’s rawest, bluest, examination of himself, with an interesting circular structure. Woody’s 1990’s output was kind of an unsung renaissance for him, there is a creative spark in his work that wasn’t there in his previous work, an edge to his writing and filmic style and yes, this is most likely due to the turmoil in his personal life. Starting with Husbands and Wives (1992) to Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Woody produced a near perfect body of work that weirdly paralleled the indie spirit that ran through the arts of that decade. The first half of his 2000’s Small Time Crooks to Melinda and Melinda (which I liking to a certain extent) seemed to be the end of the road for Woody, but he found his voice again with Match Point (2005) and rode that wave as far as it could go. At 89 he says he’s done, which I’m sure is music to many ears. I don’t believe in throwing the art out with the artist. That’s me. So I still watch Woody’s films and they still bring me joy, but there is always that thought in the back of my head, parallels being drawn between the lives of the characters in his films and Woody the man on Earth, that I don’t think will ever go away.

Any film that can make me this emotional gets five stars without question. The back of my throat had that pre-cry soreness almost from frame one, as Gints Zilbalodis and his animators were so adept at introducing and making me fall in love with their doe eyed protagonist, that I couldn’t bear the mere thought of it in the inevitable danger I knew was coming. My eyes got heavier with mist as the film went on, until it flowed like the water in this film. These weren’t tears of sadness to be clear, but tears from the beauty and hope that can come into fruition as a result of developing friendship during catastrophe. Flow is the perfect film for our times. If these disparate creatures, a cat, dog, capybara, secretarybird, lemur, and whale, can work together toward a worthy common goal, so can we.

It’s Ken Russell, so that lack of nuance and subtlety IS the point. It’s no accident. It’s not like Ken Russell suddenly forgot how to make films in 1991. Now, you may not like the point and that’s totally understandable, but to me it somehow feels less egregious than the lack of subtlety found in films like The Brutalist because Russell with his film Whore has no interest in hiding it in the glossy sheen of an epic or an art film.

Dear Mr. Hackman,

Thank you for 45 years of playing film roles in which you fit so unexpectedly and seamlessly into a multitude of worlds. From a 1930s bank robber, to a 1970s hard nosed New York detective, from a 1990s nuclear submarine commander, to a 1950s basketball coach, from a late 1800’s sheriff, to a paranoid 1970s wire tapper, from a 1960s FBI agent, to the Wes Andersonland patriarch of an eccentric family this letter is attached to, you somehow brought those worlds and those roles to you, to your everyman persona, not the other way around, and I bought you in those roles every single time, without hesitation. How did you do that? I’ll always you as one of the few actors that seemed to be born old, yet never aged. 

Love always,
Rant

Super Weird 1990s Cocktail.

Ingredients:

One part Rosemary’s Baby.
One part Sisters.
One part Barbet Schroeder.
Two parts Bridget Fonda.
Three parts Jennifer Jason Leigh. 
A sprig of Stephen Tobolowsky.
A sprig of Stephen Weber. 
A sprig of Peter Friedman.
Dash of Zima optional.
Stir EXACTLY two revolutions.
Pour over ice. 
Try not to roll eyes when you taste the ridiculous third act showdown.

Oh nothing, just one of the greatest Marlon Brando films that nobody ever talks about. Richard Boone’s quietly psychotic double crossing criminal has got to be an avatar for Peter Stromare’s character in Fargo and Rita Moreno playing a junkie flight attendant who has somehow gotten mixed up with this rough bunch of extortionists and kidnappers has never been better. Plus Hubert Cornfield‘s direction is a beautiful cross between Jean-Pierre Melville and Robert Bresson.

Adam McKay is a prophet.

This may be the most original take on the vampire myth ever to hit a frame of silver nitrate. Silver nitrate is the first thing that came to mind when I consumed this transcendent Arrow 4K last night, because the look Abel Ferrara achieves here is as if he went back in time and shot The Addiction in 1910 and then somehow transposed it over a timeless version of New York City circa 1994, one where the nihilism of Nietzsche, Burroughs, Sartre and Beckett are on an even playing field with Cypress Hill, Onyx and Schooly D.

Lili Taylor, woefully underrated Lili Taylor, hits levels of intensity here that rival any emotional tank draining performance you can think of, including Robert De Niro’s Jake LaMotta and more recently Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter. If you aren’t convinced of this by the time the orgiastic climax of this film is over, then watch it again and again and again until you are.

People who are coming at this film from a purely “problematic” POV are I believe missing the point. The portrayal of human sexuality here through the lens of the Oscar Wilde quotes: “I have no objection to anyone's sex life as long as they don't practice it in the street and frighten the horses.” or more to the point: “Everything in the world is about sex except sex,” did not bother me at all. Human sexuality is complicated and can come from a very primal place and doesn’t always fit neatly into an intimacy coordinator’s guide book. The sexual content in this film was bold and brave and probably struck chords with some viewers they didn’t know they could strum. What did bother me about this film was the unnecessary use of repetition of scenes we had already seen earlier in the film. In real life these scenes between people happen over and over, but here dramaturgically weren’t necessary. 

I like the idea of Halina Reijn‘s genre defying style here when it comes to late 80’s-early 00’s erotic thrillers, but the notion that at every plot turn Reijn is telling herself “what wouldn’t happen in a normal erotic thriller at this point?” can also become its own predictable formula. I think Todd Hayne’s May December and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher were more successful tellings of this type of story. If you liked Babygirl, which I did, but not on a 5 or even a 4 star level, I highly recommend a Swedish television series on Netflix from a few years ago called Love & Anarchy, which I believe mines the same territory, nearly identically, but in a more effective way.

Anybody else wonder what happens to Detective Mills’ dogs at the end of this movie? Somerset doesn’t seem like a dog person. As a dog person myself I think David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker have some explaining to do. And I just watched the new 4K of this and it’s 
S T U N N I N G. Worth the wait. And worth a purchase.

I only know of one filmmaker who can make a polemic about the infighting between the Maoist, Leninist, Marxist, Trotskyist and Socialist wings of the Communist Party so damn entertaining.

Just came from a screening of this in Long Beach, CA with Redd Kross and the director present for a Q&A. And I have to say these guys are one of the more unsung trendsetters of the 1980s and 1990s. When it was cool to have short hair, hate hippies and shit on mainstream music, at the height of the punk rock era, they grew their hair long and changed their sound and others followed, ie, iconic bands like Black Flag grew their hair and changed their sound. Later in the 1980s when it wasn’t cool to like 70s glam rock, MOR, Kiss, they unabashedly loved and played music that simultaneously satirized and paid homage to 70s glam rock, MOR, Kiss and shortly thereafter, bands like Poison and Ratt cashed in, but Redd Kross rarely got their due, for their style or more importantly for their musical output. 

Andrew Reich’s Born Innocent and George Hickenlooper’s Mayor of the Sunset Strip are in a conversation with each other. Besides the obvious connection that Rodney Bingenheimer was the first to play Redd Kross on his radio show when they were a snotty teenage punk band, both Redd Kross and Rodney are Zeligs of the music industry. They always seemed to be around when the history was being made. Coincidence? Constantly just ahead of the trends, makers of music history before it was recognized as history, pioneers of the culture they toiled in, but never got the big paycheck that came to others who knew how to play that part of the game better. Highly recommend this doc for those who are into stories about unsung musical heroes.

Dear Mr. Lynch,

Thank you for the primordial weird you introduced me to at a formidable age. Thank you for teaching me to look at cinema in a new way. You will always be my Luis Buñuel filtered through the myth of the American Midwest, buttoned up shirts, sock hops, Dairy Queen, strong cigarettes, black coffee, cherry pie, Pabst Blue Ribbon, promise rings, letterman jackets, drive-in movies and all the nasty stuff that bubbles just underneath. Hopefully you’re at a Bob’s Big Boy right now, making your case to the Buddha for Transcendental Meditation. A Bob’s Big Boy with no smoking restrictions, unlimited milkshakes and fries and a typewriter that never jams. 

Love always,
Rant

Is this an “out-of-control” performance from Marlon Brando as Vincent Canby put it, or is it “fun as hell” as I put it? You be the judge.

This film hasn’t aged a second in the 20 years since its release. In fact it may have done something most filmmakers can only surmise in their wildest dreams: it has gotten younger. With this film Michael Haneke has tapped into a story so timeless that it doesn’t matter what mechanics he used to tell the story that generally ages most films on their opening day. 

Haneke’s instrument of opening the massive wounds of generational trauma and the guilt that so peskily comes with it, are video tape and childlike drawings. And the film was shot on HDCam video tape. All dated instruments of visual recording, but Haneke’s understanding and presentation of his themes are so acute, so granite hard, that he could’ve told this story with primitive cave drawings or in any era he chose and it would’ve had the same impact. 

Much has been said about Haneke's deliberate ambiguity in Caché and I understand that some cinema goers can’t stand ambiguity. But in the hands of a master like Haneke ambiguity can be as powerful an instrument in the orchestra of cinematic tools as the trumpet is in a Miles Davis solo.

I first saw this film back in 2005 and I never forgot it. Two scenes in particular are so etched in my brain that I feel like it’s as close as I will ever come, through a cinematic lens, to actually experience generational trauma, and that is a gift. But I can’t say I got that back in 2005, if not on a conscious level. As a near 50 year old, on my second watch of this film, the unconscious and conscious played so well together that the film hit even harder. To show us generational trauma in such a universal manner can hopefully open some eyes as to the generational traumas that are sadly being perpetrated on this planet everyday and open eyes break cycles of trauma. And for this gift Haneke has given us without being the least bit didactic, I have upgraded it here from 4.5 stars, based on the memory of my 2005, to 5 stars on this rewatch. Just my microscopic way of trying to extend the reach of this film. 

Now I’ve been inspired to rewatch The Piano Teacher, which I probably watched back in 2001 for all the wrong prurient reasons, I must’ve been extremely disappointed, hopefully I wake up to another Haneke film with these fresh 50 year old eyes.

WAKE UP!!!! I know Spike Lee has been lambasted over the years for the homophobia displayed in this film. He dedicated School Daze to groundbreaking fashion designer Willi Smith, which I found surprising because he was an openly gay man. I think Spike was really trying to show that this kind of homophobia existed at Morehouse and other such HBC’s, and there is no doubt, especially in the 1970s, when Spike went there and in 1987 when this film was shot, this kind of homophobia was just part of the culture. Not condoning it, but I it vividly in the 1980s and 1990s myself. Whether Spike himself actually engaged in that kind of homophobia in his personal life only he can say. But I don’t think School Daze is putting a positive spin on any of the prejudices it portrays. It’s just pointing out that they exist in all strata’s of society. And there is no better filmmaker working today or any day to point out these prejudices without it feeling like a polemic, because Spike’s visual style and dialogue are so alive and so vivid that he makes learning these hard facts of culture entertaining, and what better way to teach than to entertain?

Francis Ford Coppola made a zany swinging 1960’s comedy?! This fits right in with such other mid-to-late 1960s comedies that I’ve come to realize I adore as a kind of subgenre: The Graduate, The Landlord, Harold and Maude, Greetings, Hi, Mom!, The Knack…and How to Get It, Cactus Flower, Barefoot in the Park, Bedazzled, The Russians Are Coming, Putney Swope, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Loved One, The Owl and the Pussycat, Wild in the Streets, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Comedies, usually in an urban setting, with very free editing and quick, often socially satirical dialogue and surreal touches that the characters sometimes acknowledge as weird and sometimes don’t. Many of these comedies are shot in a style that pays homage to the European Art House films of the first half of the 1960s. Especially French and British New Wave. I would say the Godfather (sorry bad cinema themed dad joke) of all these films is Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night. Most comedies shot today don’t have 1/5th of the visual flare that this era of comedy did.

Ali Abbasi did the near impossible: He humanized Roy Cohn and Donald Trump.  Jeremy Strong, Sebastian Stan and Maria Bakalova managed to play their near parody of themselves real life characters with depth and subtlety. The transformation of Donald Trump from almost humble (?!) near black sheep of the Trump family to a horrible inhumane monster is handled deftly and with a lighter touch than you’d imagine. Of course hindsight makes this film all the more poignant and scary. Bravo to all involved for tackling this story and doing it in a way that doesn’t feel like an SNL sketch.

Such a well drawn road movie. A tender character study. And sadly, it’s nearly as timely now as it was in 1969. Kind of Coppola’s retelling of Of Mice and Men, but through the lens of the turmoil of the American late 1960’s instead of the turmoil of the Great Depression of the American 1930’s. Has James Caan ever played a character this vulnerable before or since? I saw this when I worked at a video store in the 1990’s. It was on one of those green clamshell VHS releases from Warner Bros. I didn’t fully get the themes of this film in my 20s, but they certainly resonate with me more now nearing 50. Coppola was 29 when he directed this. Certainly a man wise beyond his years to be able to pull something like this off with this kind of authenticity. Great sound design by Walter Murch. If I ever get to make a movie again I am certainly going to be stealing those flashback edits where the picture temporally changes, but the sound does not. So effective. So true to how memory can work,

Conventional wisdom: “You can’t make a straightforward Dylan biopic! You have to do it like Todd Haynes’ did with I’m Not There!” (which I like)

James Mangold: “Hold my capo.”

Full disclosure: I’m a giant Dylan fan and so may be just a tad biased, but that doesn’t mean I respond to every portrayal of Dylan on screen in a positive way, but a sure way to get me on your side is if early in your film you present to me a scene in which 19 year-old Bob Dylan visits a dying Woody Guthrie in the hospital, with Pete Seeger also there at his bedside, and Dylan plays him one of his originals “A Song For Woody” and if that scene is actually well acted and well performed musically and doesn’t feel utterly apocryphal, then I’m putty in your hands. And wouldn’t you know it: not only did James Mangold, Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton and Scoot McNairy do just that, but they gave me chills in the process.

Mangold’s secret here and the secret to any good music biopic is simple. Limit the time span covered. Yes, a simple trick, but getting the performances and picking and choosing what and what not to include is extremely difficult. And yes, Mangold does play with the historical accuracy of the sequence of events in this part of Dylan’s life, but it didn’t bother me. Mangold seems to have a preternatural ability to do this within the music biopic genre without it being obvious or annoying like it was in Bohemian Rhapsody. He was smart enough to not abandon biopic tropes completely, instead tweaking them just enough so that they seem fresh. He throws in obscure Easter Eggs in A Complete Unknown for Dylanheads while not making it too esoteric for the layman. And he did NOT avoid Dylan’s type A asshole personality, nor his penchant for telling complete lies about his past. 

Dylan is presented here as the contrarian he always was. The one who refused to be pigeonholed. The scoundrel who was so self absorbed and so opaque that the women who spent the most time with him didn’t know who the real Dylan was or what he was thinking from one moment to the next and Timothée Chalamet embodied this Dylan in the performance of his life and surely the best Dylan portrayal to yet grace a movie screen and that includes Cate Blanchett’s in I’m Not There. 

The film is a series of cycles of anger and frustration by the people who Dylan surrounds himself with, followed by catharsis usually as a result of a song Dylan writes and performs. Call me a sucker, but I never grew tired of this cycle, in which Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo (aka Suze Rotolo) or Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, get to their wits end with Dylan and forgive him for his transgressions, in simple cut aways, where their eyes tell us all we need to know, as they listen in awe of his talent, as he breathlessly debuts one classic song after another, often holding audiences in complete rapture as he does. 

A Complete Unknown, doesn’t get too bogged down in the details of where Dylan’s boundless talent came from, it gives us just enough to show that he was the most exceptional cipher of the great American songbook to ever live. How else did a person so young, write so many songs, in such a short period of time, that will never grow old and never die? Songs like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” in that first magical Dylan period of 1961-1965, which this film covers, just seemed to flow out of him, as if he were a conduit to all the great music and all the great poets to ever exist and his superpower was his uncanny ability to pluck the exact right parts out of the ether and reassemble them into timeless songs of his own. 

Chalamet, Norton and Fanning are on obvious fast tracks for Oscar Nominations. Chalamet sang and performed, live, all the songs in this film. And live on film performance makes a difference in the chills department. The overdubbed lip-synchronized method is easier on the performers, but makes for less immediacy in the results. I’m sure the first thing Chalamet did in preparation for this role was to do exactly the opposite of anything Hayden Christensen and George Hickenlooper did with their portrayal of Dylan in the 2006 film Factory Girl. Norton’s portrayal of Pete Seeger takes a few subtle twists and turns from the conventional wisdom that he was such a purist that he disowned Dylan after he went electric. Fanning’s portrayal of Suze Rotolo, the woman who was best known as Bob Dylan’s first real muse and as the woman walking down the street arm and arm with Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album, was the most in need of a multi-dimensional portrayal, as she is the least famous of the bunch and Fanning breathes life into her character. 

PS - I thought I never needed to hear the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night” in a movie again, but Mangold found a way to use it without it being a complete and utter eye roll obvious needle drop.

This review may contain spoilers.

This film would’ve been so much more interesting if the Liam Neeson character was actually having an affair and Chloe was a conduit for Neeson’s and Julianne Moore’s character to explore their lost emotional and sexual connection with each other to rekindle their fading marriage, instead of going down the Fatal Attraction highway that it does in the final third. Not one of Egoyan’s finest moments.

Name a filmmaker working today who is better than Robert Eggers at transporting you to another time and place. Eggers doesn’t just make movies, he makes immersive experiences. No detail ever feels out of place. Not for a single nanosecond do you question the authenticity of every single frame of his films. And I haven’t seen such exquisite candle lit interiors since Barry Lyndon. Outstanding.

There are two epic films this year about genius architects: one written and directed by a well established legend of cinema, an octogenarian, who has been trying to make his film since 1975 and put his own fortune, a la Jacques Tati, on the line to make it his way with no studio interference. The other is by a 36 year-old actor, with great talent, turned writer/director with great talent. The octogenarian’s film was panned as a failure with the accusation that it felt like an elder statesman trying to make a young filmmaker’s film, the other has been generally hailed as a masterpiece of vision and maturity by a filmmaker who seems to have wisdom beyond his years. 

You’ll never guess which one I responded to more favorably (see my review of Megalopolis). That’s my little twist of this review and I think that Brady Corbet was going for a massive twist in the second half of his film. And like the twist you’re reading in this review, which doesn’t land with any power, because who gives a fuck about my opinion, Corbet’s twist doesn’t land the way you’d hope a film with a 3.5 hour runtime would have. And I’m the last person you’ll hear complaining about movie runtimes, but man did I feel every second of this film, especially the second half.

I KNOW, Corbet has a 5 star unquestioned masterpiece in him, but the Brutalist, for me, and contrary to popular opinion, isn’t it. 

Is this a bad film? Absolutely not. Is it the next There Will Be Blood (which some are comparing it to), Heaven’s Gate (of which I see a lot of similarities), Oppenheimer, Andrei Rublev, Once Upon Time in America, Godfather Part II, Giant, or even Maestro? No it’s not that either. It stubbornly exists somewhere in the limbo between those films. And another 3.5 hour film that is reminiscent of the Brutalist from a few years back, Babylon, had the same “ambition not quite met” thing happening, but I gave it 5 stars, because it’s a film about film, shot on film, and I’m a sucker for films about film, especially when they’re shot on film. I’m the first to it that really isn’t fair to Mr. Corbet and it’s my own bias to bear. 

Shot in 35mm, in VistaVision (no less), visually, The Brutalist is STUNNING. VistaVision was used to lens cinematic royalty like The Searchers and Vertigo, and I LOVE LOVE the kind of deference to analogue that newer filmmakers seem to be gravitating towards, but I feel like the format was somewhat wasted here, used effectively, but not to its fullest. And I’m saying this having just watched a beautiful 70MM print at Quentin Tarantino’s Vista Theater in Los Angeles. 

There are interesting ideas in the Brutalist. What I really responded to most in this film was the unexpected humor, which I think may be the strongest aspect of Corbet’s writing/directing here. Nevertheless, I feel like Corbet and company were too afraid to explore full emotional impact. When emotion was displayed it often came in unearned crescendos. The film has a stubborn gauzy membrane that won’t let the audience immerse itself in the emotions of these characters. Is this the filmmaker trying to be “mature” or “opaque” because that’s what “real” auteurs do? Maybe the whole arc of the Adrien Brody character is a drug induced apparition like the Robert De Niro character’s in Once Upon a Time in America may or may not be? You can read this film many ways. But the Brutalist isn’t as alluring in its ethereal ambitions as Once Upon a Time in America, so it’s not as easy to forgive its shortcomings. That’s the end result for me, and maybe I’m just opaque in my consumption of cinema, but there are few filmmakers who can get away with this deliberate lack of emotional clarity and Corbet chose the wrong sized story to indulge that style of storytelling.

Full disclosure, I’ve not seen another Brady Corbet directed film, so this opaque style may be the intended metier of all of his films and if so bravo to Mr. Corbet, for forging a style and sticking to it, but in this particular film that style was a detriment.

Maybe The Brutalist will be a grower for me. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind on the afternoon of December 23, 2024, or my expectations for this film were unfairly high. Maybe this is the masterpiece many are saying it is and it’s my own gauzy membrane that won’t let me see it. Time will tell.

I liked it. Especially that 16mm look Gia Coppola does so well. Yes, Pamela Anderson’s performance is brave and bold, all the performances are solid. I could’ve used more Jamie Lee Curtis though, the film comes truly alive in every scene she’s in. But I keep getting an itching feeling that they left some of the most interesting parts of this story unexplored. Or at least under-explored. A lot of paint by numbers fill in dramatic plot point here, yet without exploring each thoroughly enough for those plot points to land emotionally. I haven’t seen The Wrestler in a long time, but this reminded me of a much less nihilistic version of that story. Or a less melodramatic version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

The greatest ‘Christmas movie that everybody forgets is a Christmas movie’ ever made.

X “Howard Hawks’ style is boring.” I’ve actually heard this from supposed cinephiles. Anybody who says that needs to watch this nasty little slice of a pre-code fever dream. And along with M, The Public Enemy, Applause, Blackmail, Little Caesar, and Sous les toits de Paris, a sparkling example of how nimble a visual style can be in an early sound film. X

What was it about 2007? Maybe it was the anger over 15 years of neoliberalism and neoconservatism that finally trickled down to major studio films. Whatever it was there was a confluence of artistic fervor that produced Zodiac, No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Eastern Promises, I’m Not There, Into the Wild, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Juno, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Superbad, Away From Her, Grindhouse, The Savages, Gone Baby Gone, Sunshine, Hot Fuzz, etc. If past is prologue, due to the current anger at political systems of all stripes, I think we’re due for another magical year of cinema like 2007. Here’s hoping anyway.

Rewatch. Eighth time? See my recent review of The Last Waltz to see why this film gets better with every watch. The two films have very similar attributes (oddly) in that way. Besides the detail in this film being insane from the micro to the macro, that takes an obsessive (best possible way) like Tarantino to pull off, which slaps you across the face (best possible way) on every viewing, I previously found this film to be episodic, but with really great episodes that equaled a 5-star movie. This time I found that the story is actually skillfully seamless on every level. The connections from one moment to the next are subtle, but they are there on a near metaphysical level. Despite the film’s 2 hour and 41 minute runtime, I don’t think a frame could be cut from it without sacrificing the masterpiece that is the whole. All that breathing Tarantino lets the film do between moments of consequential story are perfectly orchestrated to make the now legendary ending hit that much harder. I was touting this film as possibly Tarantino’s best back when I first saw it at the Cinerama Dome (gosh I miss that place) on 70MM opening night in 2019, but now there is no qualification of ‘possibly’, it IS his best. The reasons I thought that was a possibility back then were mostly ethereal in nature, they are now becoming concrete and with that I see this film is working on levels I didn’t previously fully appreciate.

There are great concert films: Woodstock, Festival, Monterey Pop, Stop Making Sense, Gimme Shelter, Jazz on a Summer Day, Sign “O” the Times and now I guess you can put Taylor Swift The Eras Tour in that pantheon, but none hold a candle to this ramshackle feast of a film.

What happens when you gather The Band, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Ringo Starr, Neil Diamond, Ronnie Hawkins, Eric Clapton, Paul Butterfield, Ronnie Wood, the greatest cameramen in the world, a shit ton of cocaine and a young uber talented filmmaker to pull it all together, for a one off farewell Thanksgiving Day concert in San Francisco 1976? The Last Waltz. 

This is one of those rare films, and I’ve seen it probably seven times now, that gets better with every viewing. Why? Because you pull something different from it every time. Small moments leap out at you that you never noticed before. A moment on stage or subtext in an interview that becomes text. This time around a particular interview with Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm in which Helm is telling a story about the origin of what became Rock ‘n Roll, told me more about the relationship between those two giants than full books on the subject ever could. Both men have unlit cigarettes in their mouth and Levon lights a match, just watch what Levon does with the match and how he weaves it into his story. How Robertson treated Levon and the other of the Band in this film and beyond well be left for another Letterboxd review (or two or three). But in this moment you can tell these men have genuine affection for each other. 

And then there is Scorsese’s ability to weave the story of cinema, into just about every frame of film he as ever shot, even in a concert documentary about the Band. He never misses an opportunity to reference the art of cinema itself. He deliberately leaves in the nuts and bolts of filmmaking in his interview and in between concert footage. The audible cues of a sound man are left on the soundtrack for example, and leaving in pre-roll footage of a walk and talk that is usually cut out without a second thought, reminds the viewer that this is indeed cinema and it’s an illusion, and these are the secrets to that illusion. This gives The Last Waltz a particular spice that simply does not exist in other concert films. 

All that aside, there is the simple fact, that for me, no concert film gives me chills and makes the hair standup on my arms more often than does The Last Waltz. And that’s why it will always be my personal favorite.

The third and least of Woody Allen’s amoral murder trilogy along with Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point (both masterworks IMO). Of the three this one lacks credulity due to the motivation of the characters, which in of themselves are believable, but the way they come about and the way they are asked to act on those motivations is hard to swallow. Nevertheless, this is still a solid little thriller and better than I ed it when I first saw it back in 2007.

Maybe the scariest most accurate film ever made to illustrate the adage “If it seems too good to be true it probably is.” Whirlwind romance and intense sexual attraction go only as far as the insecurities of the individuals involved will allow it. And pesky realities like bills, work, everyday responsibilities, family, failures, tragedy, etc, tend to be the real metrics of a lasting relationship. Boring and depressing? Maybe so. But I tried to burn the candle at both ends once and I wasn’t cut out for it. And when it’s all over, I mean, really over, like you’re taking your last breaths, what thoughts do you think are going to rush through your mind? Will it be that time you had incredible sex? Or will it be some little moment you had no idea was that important until you gain the perspective of wisdom that tends to materialize at the end of life?

Films that deal with psychedelia in all its forms and all its eras. Including films that were made before the term “psychedelic” was coined (I.e. surrealist films). If a film had a psychedelic or surreal sequence or appearance by any character who is supposed to represent the psychedelic or surreal experience, it will be added to this list.

• $10,000 for a Massacre
• The 1000 Eyes of Dr Maddin
• 10 Nights' Dreams
• The 10th Victim
• 12-12-12 | The Concert for Sandy Relief
• 13 Ghosts
• 180
• 1857 (Fool's Gold)
• 1966: 50 Years Ago Today
• 1967

...plus 7039 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of films that involve the trials and tribulations of filmmaking AND/OR the love of cinema by its characters AND/OR film as a plot point AND/OR non film related content that films as a reference point. Documentaries about the physical making of a film or the film’s impact on society or a particular filmmaker, actor, writer, producer, etc. or a film movement are included. If there is a scene in which characters are discussing film in the movie it will be included. If there is a general filmic meta-textual quality to the content it will also be included.

• The 1000 Eyes of Dr Maddin
• The 100 Greatest Films
• 100 Jahre Hollywood - Die Carl Laemmle Story
• 100 Scariest Movie Moments
• 100 Years at the Movies
• 100 Years of Horror: Girl Ghouls
• 100 Years of Horror: The Frankenstein Family
• 100 Years of Japanese Cinema
• 100 Years of Warner Bros.
• 10 Questions for Werner Herzog

...plus 7987 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films that utilize either punk rock as a theme or subject or the spirit of DIY and punk rock in their plots, soundtracks, characters, attitude. If a film has an appearance of punks of any kind, including what some bad director considered to be punk (aka “movie punk”) and even if they just show up in the background, I will add it to this list. 

There are 15 musical figures and 29 bands and several other movements and figures on this list I include as punk even though they predate the term punk in this context and genre of punk rock because of their influence on the genre and movement as a whole: 

Musical Artists: 

Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico, Jonathan Richman, Bryan Ferry, Captain Beefheart, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, David Bowie, Roky Erickson, Frank Zappa (and the Mother of Invention), Neil Young (and Crazy Horse), Brian Eno, Todd Rundgren.

Bands: 

Flamin’ Groovies, the Kinks, Roxy Music, the Faces, The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Fugs, Hawkwind, Big Star, Kraftwerk, Can, Cluster, Amon Düül II, Neu!, Faust, T Rex, Mott the Hoople, the Sonics, Sparks, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Doors, Television, 13th Floor Elevators, Velvet Underground, MC5, The Stooges, Modern Lovers and New York Dolls. Any band that influenced Lenny Kaye, any band who appears on the Nuggets comps, Pebbles comps, Back from the Grave comps, etc. 

Movements and people (who aren’t considered punk rock, but definitely were in spirit)

The early Rockabilly movement, Fluxus, Dada, the Beats, Surrealism, angry young men, the Yippies, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Situationist International, the anarchist movement of the 19th century and any number of uprisings such as the ones in May 1968 Paris, , BLM protests of 2020, anti-war marches of the 1960s, slave revolts, figures I can’t all name here like Charlie Parker and Amadeus Mozart, etc. 

Special thanks of course to the book Destroy All Movies.

• 10000 Maniacs: MTV Unplugged
• $100 and a T-Shirt: A Documentary About Zines in the Northwest
• 10 Things I Hate About You
• 12-12-12 | The Concert for Sandy Relief
• 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests
• 1,7
• 180
• 18 Again!
• 1990: The Bronx Warriors
• 1991: The Year Punk Broke

...plus 5326 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The 101-Year-Old Man Who Skipped Out on the Bill and Disappeared
• 10 Items or Less
• 12 Bucks
• 1991: The Year Punk Broke
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 200 Motels
• 2010
• 2012
• 25 km/h
• The 27 Club

...plus 1896 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A “Modern Western” does not necessarily involve gunfights and showdowns, though some do. And they don’t necessarily take place in a western setting, though some do. They’re films that have the spirit of the west, western genre tropes and/or the death of the west running underneath them. I have not seen all of these, so this list is three things, 1) an attempt to gather all these films in one place, 2) a watchlist and 3) a recommendation list.

• 7 Faces of Dr. Lao
• 7 Women
• 800 Bullets
• 8 Seconds
• 92 in the Shade
• Adiós Amigo
• Aferim!
• After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
• Ain't Them Bodies Saints
• Aliens

...plus 433 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Will add to it as it grows.

• 10 Rillington Place
• 12 Angry Men
• 1900
• 1941
• 1984
• #1 Fan: A Darkomentary
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 2046
• 24 Hour Party People
• 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown

...plus 2941 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 10
• 1001 Perversions of Felicia
• 10 1/2 Weeks
• 120 Days of Sodom
• 14 and Under
• 1900
• 1982: Greatest Geek Year Ever!
• 1999 Madeleine
• 200 Proof
• 2 + 2

...plus 3781 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of films in which the characters and/or actions are thinly veiled facsimiles of real people and events.

• 1982
• 1982
• 21
• The 400 Blows
• 69
• 8 Mile
• 8½
• Accattone
• Adaptation.
• Adolphe

...plus 451 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck
• 14 d’abril. Macià contra Companys
• 19 Months
• 2 Jennifer
• 388 Arletta Avenue
• 6-5=2
• 6-5=2
• 666: The Devil's Child
• 7 Days in Hell
• 8213: Gacy House

...plus 589 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films based on real life murders, murderers and murder sprees.

• 10 Rillington Place
• 10 to Midnight
• The 12th Victim
• 15 Murders: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer
• 22 July
• 2 Turntables and a Microphone
• 3 Acts of Murder
• 3 Brothers - Radio Raheem, Eric Garner and George Floyd
• 3: JFK Homicide
• 4 Little Girls

...plus 1065 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Any film whose principal plot revolves around or has a scene in which major/minor characters are playing video games/pinball or has an appearance of any kind of video games/pinball, even if it’s just in the background, going up to the 16bit era.

• 100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience
• 13 Going on 30
• 16 Blocks
• 23 Paces to Baker Street
• 3 Men and a Baby
• The 400 Blows
• 51/50 Mall Cop
• 8 Bit: A Documentary about Art and Videogames
• 8 Bit Generation: The Commodore Wars
• 8 Bit Legacy: The Curious History of Video Games

...plus 787 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Includes all films referenced verbally by the characters, shown visually through clips, seen on posters and photos and signs, etc, audibly in music cues and generally in the meta text of the film itself (i.e. films that influenced and were influenced by The Dreamers). References listed in the order of appearance in the film. All films on the list were inspired by my watching the film itself. No outside lists were consulted. This also acts as a historical context guide map for the film. If I’ve missed something in the film or you feel something should be added that inspired the film, please feel free to comment below.

1. The Strange Ones
2. Wake at Generation
3. Jimi Hendrix
4. Shock Corridor
5. Henri Langlois : élaboration du musée du cinéma
6. Langlois
7. Jean-Pierre Léaud: The Child of Cinema
8. Weekend
9. Something in the Air
10. Film-Tract n° 1968

...plus 145 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In honor of the release of Killers of the Flower Moon, I present a ranking of all the Martin Scorsese directed films. If anything is omitted it means I haven’t seen it.

1. Mean Streets
2. GoodFellas
3. Taxi Driver
4. Raging Bull
5. The Last Waltz
6. A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies
7. After Hours
8. The Age of Innocence
9. The King of Comedy
10. Silence

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My all-time favorite 500 films in alphabetical order. I’ll get around to ranking them at some point, maybe. I have so many still to see, that I’m sure some of these will eventually be replaced. In fact, since I first posted this list, films have been dropped and added as I recalled them.

• 12 Angry Men
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 24 Hour Party People
• 3 Women
• The 400 Blows
• 42nd Street
• 8½
• After Hours
• The Age of Innocence
• Airplane!

...plus 490 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films that he ONLY wrote or that he ONLY acted in, besides films he wrote/directed/starred in any combination, are included. If a film isn’t on here I haven’t seen it.

1. Manhattan
2. Annie Hall
3. Crimes and Misdemeanors
4. Husbands and Wives
5. Hannah and Her Sisters
6. Stardust Memories
7. Zelig
8. Bananas
9. The Purple Rose of Cairo
10. Match Point

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In order of appearance.

Films not on this list because they don’t have an entry on Letterboxd:

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, American television series from 4 March 1992 to 24 July 1993, created and executive produced by George Lucas, directed by various directors

• The Bad and the Beautiful
• Duel in the Sun
• The Girl Can't Help It
• Bigger Than Life
• Vertigo
• The Naked Kiss
• Murder by Contract
• The Red House
• The Phenix City Story
• Sullivan's Travels

...plus 100 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In order of appearance.

Films that aren’t on this list because they don’t have entries on Letterboxd:

- HBO First Look - The Making of “Swordfish” (2001)
-Dragnet (TV Series 1951-1959)
-Dragnet 1967 (1967-1970)

• The Crimson Kimono
• Pushover
• He Walked by Night
• Nocturne
• The Strip
• Out of Bounds
• Hickey & Boggs
• The Glimmer Man
• They Live
• The Thirteenth Floor

...plus 203 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In order of appearance.

• Lipstick
• Straw Dogs
• The Long Goodbye
• Some Call It Loving
• China 9, Liberty 37
• Attila 74: The Rape of Cyprus
• Malicious
• Black Orpheus
• In a Lonely Place
• A Safe Place

...plus 51 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Listed in order of appearance. Many of these come up more than once in the film, but they can only be listed in order of their first appearance.

Films not included in list because they do not have Lettrboxed entries:

-The Handmaid's Tale – Reed Morano
-Terra Firma – Margaret Tait
-Westworld – Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan

• We Were Young
• You and Me
• On the Twelfth Day...
• Brief Encounters
• The East Is Red
• First Comes Courage
• The Silences of the Palace
• Strange Days
• Harlan County U.S.A.
• Innocence

...plus 294 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films are added in order of appearance. Some are missing because they do not have entires on Letterboxd.

Missing from this list:

-The Horse that Bolted (1907) dir. Charles Pathé
-Behind the Scenes of the Filming of the Olympic Games (1937) dir. Leni Riefenstahl
-71st Academy Awards (1999) dir. Louis J. Horvitz
-Sinemaabi: A Dialogue with Djibril Diop Mambéty (1997) dir. Beti Ellerson Poulenc
-Video Killed the Radio Star (1979) (music video) dir. Russell Mulcahy
-Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999) dir. Tom Fontana
-Motion Capture Mirrors Emotion (2009) dir. Jorge Ribas

Films mentioned multiple times in the series but only could be entered once on this list (in order of reappearance):

-Sherlock Jr. (1924) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Buster Keaton
-Vivre sa vie (1962) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
-The Thief of Bagdad (1924) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Raoul Walsh
-The ion of Joan of Arc (1928) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
-The Crowd (1928) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. King 
-The Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
-Citizen Kane (1941) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Orson Welles
-Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Mervyn LeRoy
-Gone with the Wind (1939) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Victor Fleming
-Osaka Elegy (1936) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
-Citizen Kane (1941) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Orson Welles
-Cabiria (1914) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Giovanni Pastrone
-Intolerance (1916) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. D. W. Griffith
-The General (1926) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton
-The Maltese Falcon (1941) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. John Huston
-The Empire Strikes Back (1980) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Irvin Kershner
-Le Quai des brumes (1938) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Marcel Carné
-Singin' in the Rain (1952) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
-Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Mervyn LeRoy
-Taxi Driver (1976) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Martin Scorsese
-Seven Samurai (1954) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Akira Kurosawa
-Limite (1931) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Mário Peixoto
-Vertigo (1958) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
-Rio Bravo (1959) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Howard Hawks
-Battleship Potemkin (1925) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Sergei Eisenstein
-Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Louis Lumière
-Taxi Driver (1976) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Martin Scorsese
-Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Jacques Tati
-Life of an American Fireman (1903) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Edwin S. Porter
-Arsenal (1929) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Alexander Dovzhenko
-The ion of Joan of Arc (1928) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
-Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Sergio Leone
-Johnny Guitar (1954) (introduced in Episode 6) dir. Nicholas Ray
-Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Roman Polanski
-Citizen Kane (1941) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Orson Welles
-The House Is Black (1963) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Forugh Farrokhzad
-2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Stanley Kubrick
-The Fireman's Ball (1967) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Miloš Forman
-Taxi Driver (1976) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Martin Scorsese
-Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
-Raging Bull (1980) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Martin Scorsese
-American Gigolo (1980) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Paul Schrader
-Pickpocket (1959) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Robert Bresson
-The Birth of a Nation (1915) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. D. W. Griffith
-City Lights (1931) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Charlie Chaplin
-The Wild Bunch (1969) dir. Sam Peckinpah
-Mirror (1975) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
-The Godfather (1972) (introduced in Episode 6) dir. Francis Ford Coppola
-The Maltese Falcon (1941) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. John Huston
-All That Heaven Allows (1955) (introduced in Episode 6) dir. Douglas Sirk
-Taxi Driver (1976) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Martin Scorsese
-Mean Streets (1973) (introduced in Episode 9) dir. Martin Scorsese
-Persona (1966) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Ingmar Bergman
-Devi (1960) (introduced in Episode 6) dir. Satyajit Ray
-Vertigo (1958) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
-Star Wars (1977) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. George 
-Triumph of the Will (1935) (a.k.a. Triumph des Willens) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Leni Riefenstahl
-Arsenal (1929) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Alexander Dovzhenko
-Psycho (1960) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
-Blue Velvet (1986) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. David Lynch
-The Third Man (1949) dir. Carol Reed (introduced in Episode 5)
-An American in Paris (1951) dir. Vincente Minnelli (introduced in Episode 5)
-A Hard Day's Night (1964) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Richard Lester
-Intolerance (1916) dir. D. W. Griffith (introduced in Episode 1)
-Tokyo Story (1953) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
-Videodrome (1983) (introduced in Episode 12) dir. David Cronenberg
-La Roue (1923) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Abel Gance
-The Exorcist (1973) (introduced in Episode 11) dir. William Friedkin
-Audition (1999) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Takashi Miike
-Dogville (2003) dir. Lars von Trier (introduced in Episode 2)
-Do the Right Thing (1989) (introduced in Episode 12) dir. Spike Lee
-Code Unknown (2000) (a.k.a. Code inconnu) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Michael Haneke
-Persona (1966) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Ingmar Bergman
-Intolerance (1916) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. D. W. Griffith
-Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Winsor McCay
-Jurassic Park (1993) (introduced in Episode 11) dir. Steven Spielberg
-Titanic (1997) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. James Cameron
-House of Flying Daggers (2004) (introduced in Episode 12) dir. Zhang Yimou
-Sátántangó (1994) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Béla Tarr
-Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) dir. Chantal Akerman
-Psycho (1960) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
-Safety Last! (1923) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
-Employees Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Louis Lumière
-Way Down East (1920) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. D. W. Griffith
-Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Georges Méliès (Although Mark Cousins and the title on the screen indicate that the scene being shown is from La lune à un mètre, the scene is actually from Le Voyage dans la lune.
-Indiscreet (1958) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Stanley Donen
-Inception (2010) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Christopher Nolan

Films with multiple appearances with the total number of appearances after title. Ordered from most to least appearances:

-Taxi Driver (5)
-Citizen Kane (4)
-Intolerance (4)
-Arsenal (3)
-Gold Diggers of 1933 (3)
-The Maltese Falcon (3)
-The ion of Joan of Arc (3)
-Persona (3) 
-Psycho (3)
-Vertigo (3)
-2001: A Space Odyssey (2)
-All That Heaven Allows (2)
-American Gigolo (2)
-An American in Paris (2)
-Audition (2)
-Battleship Potemkin (2)
-The Birth of a Nation (2)
-Blue Velvet (2)
-Cabiria (2)
-Chikamatsu Monogatari (2)
-City Lights (2)
-Code Unknown (2)
-The Crowd (2)
-Devi (2)
-Do the Right Thing (2)
-Dogville (2)
-The Empire Strikes Back (2)
-Employees Leaving the Lumiere Factory (2)
-The Exorcist (2)
-The Fireman's Ball (2)
-The General (2)
-Gertie the Dinosaur (2)
-The Godfather (2)
-Gone with the Wind (2)
-A Hard Day's Night (2)
-House of Flying Daggers (2)
-The House Is Black (2)
-Indiscreet (2)
-Inception (2)
-Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (2)
-Johnny Guitar (2)
-Jurassic Park (2)
-Life of an American Fireman (2)
-Limite (2)
-Mean Streets (2)
-Mirror (2)
-Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (2)
-Once Upon a Time in the West (2)
-Osaka Elegy (2)
-Pickpocket (2)
-Le Quai des brumes (2)
-Raging Bull (2)
-The Record of a Tenement Gentleman (2)
-Rio Bravo (2)
-La Roue (2)
-Safety Last! (2)
-Sátántangó (2)
-Seven Samurai (2)
-Sherlock Jr. (2)
-Singin' in the Rain (2)
-Star Wars (2)
-The Thief of Bagdad (2)
-The Third Man (2)
-Titanic (2)
-Tokyo Story (2)
-Triumph of the Will (2)
-Two Men and a Wardrobe (2)
-Videodrome (2)
-Vivre sa vie (2)
-Le Voyage dans la lune (2)
-The Wild Bunch (2)
-Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (2)

• Saving Private Ryan
• Three Colours: Blue
• Casablanca
• Record of a Tenement Gentleman
• Odd Man Out
• 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
• Taxi Driver
• The French Connection
• Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge
• The Kiss

...plus 513 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Rome, Open City
• Paisan
• 1860
• Fabiola
• The Iron Crown
• Cabiria
• La Terra Trema
• Bicycle Thieves
• Undersea Fantasy
• Journey to Italy

...plus 28 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Listed in order of appearance.

• Joker
• Frozen
• Flame
• Cemetery of Splendor
• Varda by Agnès
• Portrait of a Lazy Woman
• Leviathan
• Under the Skin
• Black Panther
• Us

...plus 105 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.