Saw this a couple of months ago and have been trying to pinpoint exactly why it’s stuck with me in the way that it has. We’re not exactly in new territory here re: the ways modern relationships are formed, re-formed and disrupted in light of evolutions in social media and networking tech; ditto with the manipulation of time into practically a character of its own - a Richard Linklater specialty for decades (curiously, watching PAST LIVES is at times like watching the BEFORE trilogy sped up and smashed into one single feature), but there’s something so specific, microscopic and ultimately quite gentle going on in the way that this is formed moment to moment and in the way that it’s rooted in a sense of spirituality, the latter especially.

All throughout, there’s a contrast Song paints between the dimensions and dynamics that relationships take in the modern age (social media, dating apps, and even something simple but weirdly transformative as Skype) and something far more metaphysical. Like time itself, the whole concept here of in-yun – the ties that exist between two people across multiple lives stretched over endless years – is like this ancient eternal unshifting force that stands in quiet opposition to a modern and rapidly shifting digital world. A compelling idea by itself of course, but even more so in the way that it’s made manifest in the lives of the characters here. You don’t often see people in dramas like this being influenced and informed by a semblance of spirituality – probably with good reason as it risks overly precious or just gooey territory – but that Song allows her characters to entertain and maybe even accept the possibility that they’re inevitably shaped by larger incorporeal forces outside them and beyond their control, and then follows them as they reckon with the ramifications that stem from such a possibility is pretty remarkable. All the more so given that her direction here is so deft that it’s heartbreaking. Case in point, the standout - and maybe even the most surprising - scene from this has got to be the moment of Nora and Arthur laying in bed together, Arthur nervously wondering aloud if he’s been less of a lasting true emotional connection or more of a roadblock in her life – not something Song has him express in any sort of frustration but in total vulnerability, and is then met with understanding.

“It’s just that you make my life so much bigger – and I’m wondering if I do the same thing for you.”

That Song dares to approach such a thorny situation between a married couple with a sense of comion, and that she further allows a man’s insecurities to be portrayed in an open, plain, vulnerable way without turning around and mocking those insecurities or twisting them into something brutish in order to turn the character into some kind of antagonist is pretty impressive (let me quickly echo here Justin Chang’s spot-on sentiment that “a lesser movie would have reduced [Arthur] to a complication or, worse, a comic-relief cuckold”). It’s just a wonderful finely-observed piece of drama in a narrative full of such moments. Like the BEFORE trilogy, Song is pretty uninterested in the typical movements that this kind of story generally produces even though it does share a lot of the same basic plot mechanics, instead preferring to let a long string of grace notes like the one there between Nora and Arthur consume the focus – all of which wind up feeling massive in the face of the will-they-won’t-they drama. Just great stuff all around.

(also, I just turned thirty a few months ago, so I’ve pretty much been legally required to spend the majority of the past year thinking over and occasionally regretting most of my life’s decisions and replaying every mistake I’ve ever made – but then eventually just shrugging and accepting that they’ve led me to where I am now which is a perfectly fine place that I’m grateful to be in – so, uh… yeah… this definitely knocked me for a loop)

Nolan’s experiments in structure and perspective have always walked the fine line between immersive and obtrusive - nonlinear structures in general can sometimes feel portentous and contrived in the wrong hands - but good lord, he’s done it again. First viewing alone, this feels staggering, a towering work that builds off of both MEMENTO’s contrasted color and b&w storylines that collide into one another, and the multi-layered narrative threads of THE PRESTIGE, INCEPTION and DUNKIRK, here weaving together layers of time and space and sound and vision into one grand tapestry of a first-person cinematic experience. “Can you hear the music?” Kenneth Branagh’s character asks a young Oppenheimer - but he might just as easily have invoked a variation on TENET’s central creed: “Don’t try to understand it, feel it.” Oppenheimer can indeed hear, see, feel the music - just as we can, as Nolan burrows into the character’s subconscious to literalize and visualize his dreams and anxieties, only to then blend them with his external reality in ways both beautiful and terrifying. Early moments of his visions of dancing molecules and energy waves are downright transcendent while later scenes quickly turn nightmarish – the reverberating shaking space that envelopes him during heated moments, the blinding light he can’t escape, the merging of terror and triumph as the Los Alamos crew cheers but his attention is transfixed on the burning remains that the bomb has wrought (that silence during the cheering that’s then punctuated by individual select sounds – whew, maybe the most haunting sequence Nolan has put to film). “Your mind is the scene of the crime,” ran INCEPTION’s tagline but it could just as well be applied here. Interior and exterior life crash into one another and become so entangled that they’re indistinguishable, where physical space becomes malleable and charged with energy, primed to explode.

Major debt in all of this to Nicolas Roeg’s erratic nonlinear narratives, but probably even more so to Oliver Stone whose political works of the 1990s, JFK and NIXON in particular, worked within a similar melding of the objective and subjective in their deconstruction of 20th-century (practically mythological) icons and events, and that roared by in a fragmented collage of history, geopolitics, conspiracy theories, and courtroom drama at a bullet train speed. In fact, numerous stretches of OPPENHEIMER echo the manic intensity of the Donald Sutherland Mr. X sequence. The grinding, rocket fuel rhythm that Jennifer Lame’s edit achieves of interwoven narratives that build upon one another atop a constantly pulsating string and synth heavy score is just flat-out riveting. Editorially, it’s a whirlwind of sound and image that races forward with a relentless neurotic momentum that grows and expands and sometimes breaks into a frenzy. As a total contrast though, I’m also left ing the recurring Malick-style focus on the simplest elements and movements of nature that roots the film in something tangible, textured and earthen – flowing water, sparks flying from fires, wisps of smoke and wind, the opening shot of ripples spreading out over the surface of puddles (one of the simplest, clearest demonstrations of cause and effect that begins a film that spends so much time dealing with consequence, responsibility, and chain reactions). “It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment,” Stephen Crane wrote of nature’s indifference to war in The Red Badge of Courage (although perhaps not quite so tranquilly in Oppenheimer’s concluding apocalyptic vision of nuclear war decimating the world).

That this is also so political and so unashamedly complex and thorny in a way that frustrates the lowest common denominator studio mentality is so completely gratifying – that’s par for the course with Nolan’s work of course but is still worth mentioning (also worth mentioning that I’m so thrilled audiences are lining up in droves for this). As a combination of the experimental macro narrative structure he loves and the more internal micro complexities and contradictions of the best of his character work, it’s mesmerizing and I can’t help but marvel at its construction. Talk to me in five years and I might tell you it’s his best film.

For my money, this is a slightly better legacy sequel than KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL in its treatment of a disillusioned aged hero grappling with his place in the world after a bruised life full of wondrous and terrible sights seen, but is also way less ambitious and idiosyncratic than it should’ve been. CRYSTAL SKULL was pretty emotionally vacant but as a genre exercise in updating the series’ touchstone influence from 30s serials to 50s schlock, it had its share of evocative moments (those bookending shots of Indy left gazing in awe at the mushroom cloud and flying saucer – both just as horrifying as any of the other “superstitious hocus pocus” he’s witnessed – are two of what will no doubt be the last impactful images this franchise offers up). DIAL OF DESTINY plays like a weird inverse on that – it’s emotionally compelling but visually and energetically flat. Mangold may have been the functional safe pair of hands to turn to, but to me, he’s always been too safe, too mid-brow to really cut loose, so it’s no real surprise that he doesn’t engage in much of the youthful irreverence and the gleeful pulpy overtones this series is known for; don’t expect any musical numbers, monkey brains, giant boulders, gruesome booby traps, or any melting faces. Instead, settle in for the drabbest looking visuals $300 million can buy these days – with a muddy, murky digital sheen cast over every shot that erases any of the grit and texture and heft that the first three films captured so well ( when it felt like we were seeing real things happening in these? models and miniatures and matte paintings and blood squibs and gross-out physical effects? what happened? how did we get from the tangible lived-in reality of the previous movies… to this?). Plus, it’s all just shot in the most basic coverage you can imagine, mostly tighter close-ups framed from the shoulders-up with hardly anything staged in a master wide with a semblance of depth or movement.

But… man, is Ford so committed to this role that, despite all of that, I gotta it that I was kinda swept up by just how much pathos he projects here. There’s a moment about midway through for instance, that has him ruminating on past mistakes and regrets (and certain former franchise who may or may not show up for an appearance) that is pitched so well and hits way harder than I expected it would, and it reminded me of not only how perfectly suited Ford is for this character but just how vulnerable and emotionally exposed he can be when he really cares about the role. Even the RAIDERS callback in the final scene here – that I winced at initially when I realized what they were doing – won me over because of just how completely sincere and heartfelt he plays it. Out of the recent little trilogy in his lineup of revisiting past characters (this, BLADE RUNNER 2049, FORCE AWAKENS), this might be his most moving performance. Call me basic but he’s still one of the greats and I’d watch him play Indy pretty much any day of the week.

Probably closer to two stars than three, but I dunno, I'm in a generous mood.

Not good – but it has stuck with me over the years for precisely one scene: around the middle of the movie, Chief Brody stands watch over a crowded beach from an observation tower. By this point in the story, he’s so frantic and tightly wound about the possibility of another invading great white that he’s primed to explode – which is exactly what happens when he spots what he thinks is an approaching shark. He completely snaps and goes ballistic, screams for everyone to get out of the water, tears down the shoreline while waving his gun around, and fires off shots into the water like a man before someone shouts out that the shark he thinks he sees is just a school of bluefish. There's no shark, no danger, nothing. Everything goes silent as Brody snaps back to reality and goes white with horror at what he’s done. It's a genuinely stomach churning moment of a previously stalwart figure realizing that he’s unraveling and losing his grip, all smack dab in front of his wife, his children and the city it’s his job to protect, and Scheider plays it so convincingly, with a real affected manic edge.

The rest of this is the usual case of diminishing returns that you find in franchises that never should’ve been franchised to begin with, but there is something here though. If you’re gonna dream up imaginary sequels that could have been, there’s a way more interesting movie to be made here that’s built entirely around this scene and where it could run off to, that takes the idea of a PTSD-plagued Brody grappling with the traumatic events of the first movie and centralizes it to the entire narrative instead of just hinting at it. I don’t know a ton about the history of the film’s production, but what I’ve read suggests that original director John D. Hancock had something like that in mind, a darker, more sinister sequel that would’ve dealt with such material (before Universal unceremoniously canned him off the project a month into shooting so this could just be warped into a generic teen slasher instead). There’s a weirder, braver movie here that could’ve gone the cerebral route and really explored Brody’s clearly unresolved trauma, the alienation it’s produced in him, and the increasing havoc it’s beginning to wreak, turning him into a paranoid mess – something that would take that (albeit dynamite) tagline, “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…” for all that it’s worth and legitimately explore the ramifications of what it means for Brody, his family and their city.

Yeah, I know I’m proposing a downer sequel to what’s maybe the greatest popcorn thrill ride ever made, but there’s something about the idea of a character stumbling around in the aftermath of a terrible event and starting to put the pieces of their life and their mind back together to find a way forward that’s just really compelling (not even just solely from Brody’s standpoint either - one of Hancock’s original ideas was that the town of Amity would’ve basically died after the events of the first movie, having lost its reputation as a prime tourist spot, and would now be in the process of trying to restore its economy). Heck, while I’m thinking about it, there’s even a way that you could take the goofiest part of JAWS: THE REVENGE - that the shark (the original shark’s friend? family member? co-worker?) is somehow psychically connected to the Brody family and deadset on a path of vengeance - and work it into the storyline as some kind of bizarre delusion Brody increasingly becomes convinced of (he even hints at that very thing in the final version here, asking a marine biologist investigating a beached whale that’s been ripped to pieces whether or not sharks can take revenge). The TAKE SHELTER of killer shark movies is what I’m getting at here lol.

Wishful thinking obviously, but then again, I dunno if it would’ve been that far off from the oddball class of non-traditional sequels to mega-hits released in the late 70s - things like MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI and EXORCIST II that went off in pretty bold directions of their own, so hey, I can dream.

This definitely hits a lot of the SOCIAL NETWORK-style geek-cum-tycoon technocratic rise-and-fall story beats in a way that kinda makes you wish they’d been slightly more narratively adventurous, but I gotta say, I was actually a bit surprised at how subtly this was laced through with a sense of sadness, so much so that it really snuck up on me in the final moments with Baruchel’s character and has stayed with me in the days since first seeing it. I’m curious now to see whether knowing where it’s headed emotionally might reframe the rest of the movie on a second watch - maybe some of those elements common in this little tech subgenre won’t seem as obligatory or rote because of it. Some of that underlying sadness may just be a result of the Blackberry itself already feeling like something practically from ancient history despite how recent the events of the movie are – a product of the past now relegated to filling a spot on a bunch of those 25 Nostalgic Items From Your Childhood listicles alongside Palm Pilots and Tamagotchis – but I think Johnson and company are up to something much more nuanced here.

This is very much of a piece with his expanding playground of naive geekwad craftsmen (or wanna-be craftsmen in the case of Nirvanna the Band the Show’s two leads), all ionate and pitiful figures who trip into buffoonery as soon as they walk out their front door, characters who often don’t necessarily grow but have a tendency to lock in, hunker down and stubbornly let themselves be consumed by whatever creative mission is driving them forwards, be it assembling the puzzle pieces of a documentary or trying to get a show at the Rivoli or creating a product that just simply functions in the way that it should. Each of them of course invariably finds themselves trapped in that drive, and navigating the tension that arises when those creative pursuits collide with outside forces that push back against them is where much of the drama is staged, be those forces moral re: DIRTIES, economical re: BLACKBERRY, authoritative re: AVALANCHE, or just the force of logic itself re: NTBTS (some things are just destined to never happen – Sisyphus will never get the boulder up the mountain, Charlie Brown will never kick that football, and Matt & Jay are probably just never gonna get their band a show no matter how many schemes they come up with). I’ve been revisiting a lot of the Zapruder Films catalogue over the past month, and one thing I’ve found striking is that obsession like this is typically less a choice and more of a compulsion for these characters. They’re practically conditioned to live and function this way. They can’t help it - obsession is in their nature whether they like it or not, whether they’re conscious of it, and whether or not it causes them to spiral into self-destruction.

“I want to make beautiful things – even if nobody cares,” Saul Bass once said (a quote so good that I want to live by it), a sentiment that Baruchel’s character embodies here almost head to toe, and that I keep going back to in regards to the movie’s final scene. In the end, we’re not so much left with a figure warped by power and wealth or who’s reached the top of the mountain with a trail of carnage left behind him as we are with a craftsman compelled to fix a product so that it can function as it ought to. Minus the suit and the slicked back hair, his character ends in virtually the same place that he begins – miffed at the shoddiness of a bit of tech to the point where he can’t help but rip it apart to get it to function as it ought to, and he does so not even really out of respect for the customer or for profit or good reviews or the proper recognition but because it’s kind of the only thing he knows how to do. He’s compelled to do so because, for better or worse, it’s just simply his very nature. There’s a quirkiness to that certainly, maybe even something irable, but also (and I think this is what Johnson is getting at) a certain sadness wrapped up within it, there’s a grim downside to that nature – it’s what the second half of Bass’ quote invokes, and I just found the portrayal of that here in the movie’s final moments really quite moving.

Plus everybody just puts in really good work and this thing zips along with a real rush of energy (actually, for all of the SOCIAL NETWORK comparisons it’s drawing, I think that stylistically this has more in common with the shouty frenetic realm of Oliver Stone, especially something like WALL STREET). That style of shooting that Johnson and DP Jared Raab have been developing of planting the camera operator in the corner of a set or down a long hallway or outside a room looking in through a window, almost spy-cam style, to observe criss-crossing lines of action on a long lens certainly doesn’t fit just anywhere but boy does it fit like a glove here – all those open office scenes with the camera crash-zooming between characters moving every which way across the screen in a mad rush: this is what I’m here for.

No sophomore slump here for Johnson and the Zapruder Films crew who stretch and twist their working method from THE DIRTIES into newer and bolder shapes, taking the heavily improvised faux-documentary form and matching it with an ingenious visual inventiveness that literalizes the found footage approach - the entire movie is one great big ongoing visual effect and is among the best efforts I’ve seen at crafting a believable relic of the past, a final product that looks and feels as though it’s been stored away in a vault or dug up after being hidden away for fifty years (and slyly acts as a great reversal of the characters' goal to create a clean and clear piece of footage that convincingly fakes the moon landing). The entire production workflow of shooting digitally, printing to actual 16mm, dirtying the images up, and then re-scanning to achieve a scratched-up, weathered, filthy texture is so well done that you can hardly tell the difference between images when they cut from original footage to actual stock clips that were shot in the 60s – couple that with the standout Super 8 hidden camera scene on the set of 2001 with its 3D environments and Stanley Kubrick stand-in created from archival photographs and I genuinely think you’ve got one of the most interesting and successful visual-effects oriented features / exercises in the craft from the whole of the past ten years (and done on such a tiny budget too!)

If THE DIRTIES borrowed its naturalism and emphasis on improv cringe comedy from the likes of Sacha Baron Cohen and Christopher Guest, AVALANCHE shifted things much more towards the realm of Peter Watkins and his narrative-documentary hybrid that took the typical language and form of something like a newsreel report and employed it in places that it couldn’t have actually been in (like an 18th century battle in the Scottish highlands, re: CULLODEN) or that were entirely fictional (re: PUNISHMENT PARK), blurring the line between drama and documentary. In the same way, AVALANCHE blurs history & fantasy, cinema & reality into its own unique form, and although this certainly repeats a lot of the same beats and rhythms that popped up in DIRTIES – the blinding obsession of filmmaking and the friendships broken over such a driving pursuit, a similar gearshift from broad comedy into an unsettling paranoia, and even the visual focus on the manipulative power of film editing (swapping Final Cut for a good ole Steenbeck) – the storytelling itself plays much tighter, each beat refined and punctuated with a cleaner voice and sharper eye (only small gripe here is that some of the dialogue, likely because much of it is improvised, does tend to feel a bit too anachronistic - but as far as I’m concerned, that’s easily forgivable). Just great geeky fun all around. Really really excited to see what the team gets up to next.

Currently going back and revisiting both this and OPERATION AVALANCHE before Johnson’s new movie comes out next week. Dramatically, it’s a bit messy, but this is still one of the quintessential examples from the past decade of filmmakers taking full stock of their limitations and finding ways to turn them into strengths. It’s obviously tough for anyone young and inexperienced to produce high quality Hollywood-level products, but on the flipside, it’s arguably just as difficult for a highly experienced crew to put together something like this that comes off so raw and natural and purposefully unpolished without it feeling as artificial as a young filmmaker’s attempt at the highly professional (it’s the difference between say, the ‘99 BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and the 2016 reboot; one feels like a genuinely authentic document made by teenagers lost in the woods, and the other just too high-tech and polished that it immediately s as phony). Johnson has argued as much in numerous interviews, and I not only think he’s exactly right, but that the working method he and his team adopted here from that perspective is kinda brilliant. Top to bottom, the entire aesthetic circumvents the group’s lack of traditional on-set experience and technical know-how in such a way that it turns those typical bugs that betray low-tech, no-budget films for what they are into bona-fide features of their own. I mean jeez, I can’t watch this and not constantly scoff at myself and wish that I could go rewrite my late teens and early twenties to go and make movies like this instead of trying to shoot for a quality level that I couldn’t have possibly achieved.

Hits hardest when it focuses on the story of a dissolving relationship as two friends realize that they’re drifting apart (mid-rewatch, I started thinking about the central friendship breaking apart in GHOST WORLD and I swear, a split-second afterwards, I spotted a dvd of it on one of the shelves in the background of a shot here, so I can’t be totally off with the comparison), and it mostly sticks the landing in finding a balance between reveling in its characters dorky obsessions (e.g. nice end title re-creations that cop other movies’ styles) but also having the guts to recognize how all-consuming, blinding and, in the end, destructive those same obsessions can prove to be (this might also genuinely be one of the few movies to recognize that cinephilia is less cute and more dweebish and annoying than cinephiles think it is - *I knowingly type out on letterboxd(dot)com, fully embracing that I too am deeply guilty of having annoyed many a friend and family member in the past with endless dweeby movie references, anecdotes, and line recitations*).

Probably makes a few missteps along the way with the more meta self-aware angle though – positioning Matt’s character to be fully aware of the antisocial, dangerous behaviors associated with real-world school shooters and mass murderers but then also fall prey to those exact behaviors himself probably works a bit better in concept than it does in execution. There are just a handful of moments that feel like they’re trying to have it both ways – having the character comment on those behaviors but also exhibit them outright (the couple of references to Catcher in the Rye for instance - Matt ironically checking out multiple copies of the book from the library in order to appear crazy, or putting on a t-shirt that has the book’s title printed on it) just plays a bit more on the nose and contrived than I imagine they intended. Still, as far as directorial debuts go, this is a promising and exciting one, just a little rough around the edges.

For as tired as I am of Nostalgia™ being such a key driver in so much of what gets greenlit and stuffed to the brim with marketing dollars these days, I gotta it that it's completely charming and winning when filtered through the kind of ultra-specific and deeply personal lens that it is here. Of all the movies released over the past couple of years memorializing / mythologizing their directors’ formative years – FABELMANS, ARMAGEDDON TIME, AFTERSUN, BELFAST, LICORICE PIZZA, etc – this one almost assuredly bears the distinction of playing the most like a legitimate memoir with that guiding rambling voiceover making the whole thing feel like you’re just sitting across from Linklater as he rattles off a bunch of memories that come bubbling up one after the other in a 90-min stream of consciousness monologue. Guess I can see why that approach didn’t connect with some folks. The ongoing series of details that pile upon one another – “and this, and this, and this, oh and this” – could play like a too-loose directionless tangent, but man, did it work for me (and still does now, watching this again a year after its release). My favorite version of Linklater is when he’s up to these weird little experiments, twisting narrative into odd, contorted shapes even if the mechanics of it can wind up feeling contrived, and as an extension on the wideranging conversations in the BEFORE trilogy, the video essay nature of WAKING LIFE, and the continuous -the-baton structural flow of SLACKER where the camera nonchalantly swaps who it decides to follow every few minutes, this makes for a really nice playful entry.

Revisiting this one for the first time in years, I kept thinking about it how much it feels like a precursor to the twisted relationships in things like GONE GIRL and PHANTOM THREAD, but whew, this may genuinely be nastier and more unsettling than either of those, certainly more than I ed it being – all of the neurotic repression and everyday seedy perversions of VERTIGO and PSYCHO put on full display here in the back and forth power dynamic games between two lowdown louses. A movie about tormented characters that is itself so tormented that you practically feel as though you need to take a shower once it’s over. Put it alongside FRENZY as one Hitchcock’s darkest efforts.

One choice in a narrative chock-full of bold choices that stuck out in this rewatch: forty-five minutes or so in (certainly a narrative pivot point but placed quite a bit later than the traditional Act 1 → Act 2 transition), Hitchcock cuts immediately from Marnie’s theft at Rutland’s office safe (played out in a spectacular and grindingly tense wide-angle two shot that keeps your eyes bouncing back and forth between Hedren and the cleaning woman making her way closer and closer, and that then ends on a lovely little ironic punchline to boot) to the moment where Connery confronts her, jumping immediately over and excising any of Connery’s investigation and presumably the path of breadcrumbs he followed that leads him to Marnie. There’s an entire movie’s worth of story covered in that cut, and any other dramatist could and probably would dedicate ample screentime to get from point A to point B – but Hitchcock and screenwriter Jay Presson Allen do it in one single cut. And something about that just felt so bold, so confident, throwing away the typical building blocks and trajectory you’d expect with this kind of picture. It throws you off-axis in the best of ways, not unlike say, the decision to kill off the person you’re expecting to be your lead character thirty minutes into PSYCHO. Good stuff.

I think my brain just melted.

This is like M. Night Shyamalan getting Warners to back LADY IN THE WATER or Joe Dante nabbing full creative control and running wild on GREMLINS 2; one of those rare times that a director with a major box office hit under his belt uses all the clout he can muster to get a wacko personal vision off the ground that just ends up setting a studio’s money on fire, but man is this such a bold swing for the fences that it’s kinda hard not to ire even if it ends up as a giant mess. Boorman has said that he set about putting this together after his LORD OF THE RINGS adaptation fell through, when medieval fantasy and magic and the Arthurian legends were still running through his mind, but actually, I think the final product here bears more in common with the dystopian, iron-grip-of-the-state, sci-fi features of the pre-STAR WARS 1970s than it does with the sword & sorcery genre or what he would later go on to do with EXCALIBUR. The masses scrounge around in a ruined wasteland lorded over by a giant Big Brother-style stone head while the rich live in a literal bubble where a totalitarian state reigns supreme above all - where thought is controlled, apathy is a paralyzing disease, youthhood is a precious commodity and to be punished is to be made to grow old - but the curtain hanging over paradise is about to be pulled back and ripped to shreds when an outsider in a red speedo sneaks in to smash it all to the ground. Put it on a double-bill with SOYLENT GREEN, LOGAN’S RUN, THX 1138, or any of the PLANET OF THE APES movies and it’ll make for a pretty fun pulpy time, plus Boorman shoots and stages the heck out of this with plenty of psychedelic mirror images, timelapses, expressionistic light and shadow, and a dreamlike haze over every scene. It’s baffling from the word go - even apart from Sean Connery’s wardrobe - but is also brimming with enough idiosyncrasies and just plain slack-jawed silliness that it’s kinda impossible to not enjoy – folks, to pick just one moment, there’s a scene right in the middle of this where Charlotte Rampling delivers a powerpoint lecture on the history of sexual arousal, brings up a diagram of a penis, and wonders aloud what it is that causes erections (this movie is wild).

Big “I got this one wrong all those years ago” vibes here – this is a genuinely thrilling actioner with a marvelously bonkers cotton candy aesthetic to boot that even now, fifteen years later, feels like a glimpse into a new and different way of making movies. Technologically speaking, I’m not sure that there was a decade more singularly evolutionary in the history of the medium than the 2000s - a decade that began with digital cinema just beginning to creep its way into the market but ended with its rapidly-approaching domination an inevitability. The future was a digital one and for all the bellyaching, there was no stopping it. George Lucas, Kerry Conran, James Cameron, and the Roberts - Zemeckis and Rodriguez - may have proselytized about a future where, thanks to the miracle of the green screen, the only limit to the digital backlot feature was one’s own imagination (and one that also proffered a working environment that practically guaranteed that the on-location constraints of weather, travel, set-construction, costly reshoots, and even complicated schedules* were all either significantly reduced or just flat-out eliminated), but it’s like that prospect flipped a switch in the Wachowskis’ minds that sent them racing forwards, going galaxy-brain bananas at the possibilities of what was achievable on a formal level – so much so that I think the final product here might just be among the most radical results of the era’s mega-budget tentpoles.

As an inverse on the standard live-action/animated hybrid model that composites actors into an animated world instead of animated characters into a live-action setting, the fundamental choice and ultimately the key to any of this working is that the Wachowskis weren’t in the slightest bit interested in bridging the gap between the two mediums. Where Robert Zemeckis was pursuing photorealistic animation with his mo-cap trilogy at the same time, there’s no part of SPEED RACER that tries to lull the audience into believing that what they’re seeing is real. On the contrary, the Wachowskis took an about-face turn on that objective and totally embraced a sense of artificiality – not just with every corner of the bubblegum-pop design lathered through and across every frame but in the very way that the shot and the cut themselves operate. The screen itself is elastic, like a piece of taffy to be ripped apart and folded back in on itself. Numerous shots don’t exactly end but blend together into one single ongoing composite that slides, zooms, spins and slipstreams its way along, and the effect is head-spinning in the best of ways – heck, there are moments here that echo the kind of mad-genius, inside-out corkscrew turns that Satoshi Kon used to dream up.

We’re miles from the kinds of glorified deepfake features that have come to rule over this realm of the industry, but curiously - for whatever it’s worth - I actually think that such a cartoony aesthetic has helped it age quite well. It all goes back to the uncanny-valley paradox where a sense of believability is achieved more easily by a heavier focus on abstraction whereas the pursuit of hyper-realistic looking animation can often just create something that feels off and awkward. Not for nothing, but so many of the movies featuring photorealistic CG characters or environments made in the years since 2008 - although novel when first released - are already starting to look rather dated, whereas because the look here is so intentionally outrageous and unrealistic, it’s kept, for the most part, feeling fresh and even quite charming all these years later. Plus, clunky dialogue and a couple of weak story beats aside, this is just totally sincere and dorky and unbound by any semblance of snark or the hip cynicism that rules over so many modern blockbusters – which is more refreshing than ever.

I have a vague memory of renting this back in 2009 or 10 but just thinking that it was junk. Count me among the converted. This thing rules.

*It’s old hat at this point but for a curious Sign of the Times straight from the heart of the 2000s, it’s worth looking back at Rodriguez’s fifteen-minute film school episode on SIN CITY where he spends a great deal of time emphasizing just how few of the actors were ever actually on set at the same time despite playing scenes opposite one another. Obviously not the ideal way to shoot any picture, but also understandably desirable given that it lowers production costs and keeps the shooting schedule much more flexible.

Wickedly fun home invasion-turned-apocalyptic thriller playing in Shyamalan’s usual thematic stomping grounds: where the good of the community is pitted against the will of the individual, where the latter contends with the sacrifices (here, literal sacrifices) necessary for the sake of the former, and where faith and skepticism clash against one another – Bautista and Aldridge, in particular, embodying those two ideals rather starkly. Both do fine work, but like everyone is saying, Bautista is on another level here, projecting a weight of driving responsibility and inner turmoil through each and every restrained, controlled move. Plus - and it’s a credit to both his strength as a performer and to Shyamalan’s script - that Leonard is as anguished a character as he is without much contextualization in of backstory (unlike say, a Mr. Glass-style treatment that goes through and heavily bullet points a character's past). In general, I care less about what literally or emotionally brought a character to where they are at a film’s starting point than I do about just simply how they move and behave and react as the story itself plays out, and Shyamalan’s screenplays, I think, can sometimes move in the opposite direction to the realm of overexplaining what never really needed that much explicit information in the first place, so it’s a welcome pleasure that Leonard’s characterization here erred on the side of caution. Although while I’m on the subject, what the movie does have by way of backstory and flashbacks with Aldridge and Groff’s characters is all played quite well, much of it told primarily with simple, sharp visuals (all of which wind up paying off / culminating in that final scene with the radio which… good lord, is played so pitch-perfectly). In fact, visually, this is probably Shyamalan’s liveliest work in years. As a craftsman, he continues to shoot these simple one-location movies in such an economical but still thoroughly idiosyncratic way - with loads of dynamic compositions that get great mileage out of the anamorphic frame by really playing with the depths of the screen and the set, and that stage the actors and the action almost like a classical Hollywood picture; and alternatively, those extreme close-ups of characters’ faces framed chin to eyebrows that he loves have never been put to better use than they are here - each bringing a churning sense of claustrophobia whenever employed.

Love that he’s doing small-scale genre exercises like this, fully embracing the silliness of the material and playing it for all it’s worth. Probably my favorite of his since THE VILLAGE.

Some real technical wizardry going on here. Not to sidestep its delicate whimsy or any of its gentle musings on loneliness and the ways that we construct our own little worlds of ritual and routine in order to survive it, but it’s really quite something that - as a fake documentary - this feels as improvised and spontaneous as it does, despite being anything but. Creating a feeling of spontaneity within any faux-documentary is difficult enough (loads of those found-footage thrillers slapped together in the wake of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY spring to mind as being particularly indicative of just how phony and manufactured this style can come off as), but all the more so when your key character and his environment have to be minutely pre-planned in order to then be reverse-engineered on the stop-motion stage and re-integrated for the final effect. Although, like all of the best live-action / animated hybrids, it’s a great credit that I only really started thinking about all of this - about all of the little technical tricks and methods employed to create these images - after the credits rolled. I’ve watched this twice now actually, and only on the second viewing was I actively pausing and rewinding shots to try and guess how they achieved some of even the simplest setups here. The compositing work in this is just staggering - not once was I able to spot the seams between the stop-motion set and the actual house. Great use of digital camera moves to mimic handheld bumps and jitters, and soft sun-drenched naturalistic lighting to sell the complete image too. (excellent article here from American Cinematographer about how they conceptualized and shot this - bit.ly/3XRtuBl)

Just lovely, lovely stuff all around. Gimme twelve more movies with this little dude, please.

On just the first viewing alone, I’m left coming down somewhere in the middle here, although I could easily see my opinion on this shifting in either direction as it continues to sit with me. Arguments and complaints about historical accuracy be damned as that’s clearly not the prerogative here. This is a splashy, trashy, shouty, slimy, Kenneth Anger-style tabloid view of the industry brought screaming to the screen, and at its best, Chazelle / Sandgren / Cross and co. really go for something radical as they match that rancid tone with a blitzkrieg aesthetic. For nearly the whole first half, the camera is in frantic, coked-out, speed mode, constantly whirling and spinning about with the actors and the action rushing every which way across the frame, everything blown up to comic levels of excess. It’s a full-throttle, manic rush of energy with moments – including and especially later on in that bonkers Malick-junior epilogue that tips a hat to the industry’s constant technological re-invention and evolution – that approachs the kind of frenetic freeform cutting you’d find in a title from the French New Wave, and the effect is one that can be genuinely exhilarating. The standout setpiece from the whole thing has got to be the crosscut production sequences between Robbie’s first day on a raucous Western set and a scene-stealing Spike Jonze racing to get the perfect shot at magic hour for his medieval romance – it’s some of Chazelle’s best work, and one of my favorite scenes that I’ve seen in any movie this year.

It probably goes without saying, but I’m thrilled that something this ambitious (and clearly of little mainstream appeal) found its way through the studio system - and I’ll happily watch a giant vision like this from any filmmaker, especially one as talented as Chazelle, but I’m not quite sure that the end product holds together quite so well. Individual sequences by themselves are dynamite, but the sum total is spotty -- that uneven and increasingly languourous second half in particular. Despite SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN being directly showcased, the movie that looms the largest in the background and that quite a few moments here flagged up is BOOGIE NIGHTS. Central in both films is the larger technological shift threatening to uproot and scatter the world as the characters know it. In the same way that Anderson suggested that the transition from shooting on film to videotape was ultimately more of a disruption than an innovation for the porn industry, BABYLON’s depiction of the silent era smashing its way into the talkies isn’t just that it was decidedly roughgoing (Robbie’s first day on a mic’d sound stage that descends into madness as the crew tries to get through a single take with no disastrous interruptions is another of the movie’s best scenes, and a really tightly executed spot of cutting as well) but that it was akin to a kind of artistic suicide pill that ran the risk of warping cinema into something restrained, diluted and tarnished.

All of which makes for an interesting statement on the progression of the artform, however what Chazelle shoots for but misses that BOOGIE NIGHTS succeeded at is the downward spiral that such a shift creates for its characters who increasingly unravel from such a manic high. I don’t think this captures the weight of desperation or darkness that the characters find themselves tumbling into. Robbie’s lashing out at a party full of rich snobs that culminates in a moment where she vomits on William Randolph Hearst is played so goofy (and also just weirdly triumphant as though we’re supposed to fist-pump when she sticks it to the man) that it zaps the scene free of the consequences it entails for her volatile character. Similarly, the stakes throughout and emerging from the Rahad Jackson-style digression in the third act (despite featuring a delightfully creepy Tobey Maguire having a ball) felt slight. It's a small spoiler, but the leads attempting a quick escape south of the border in the scenes that follow have none of the danger or paranoia they need to really work as Chazelle intends them to.

Overall, I think this ultimately lacks the strength of character necessary to sustain both the sprawling ensemble nature it’s going for, and the lengthy runtime it’s saddled with. Chazelle is back to the same kind of stars-in-the-eyes dreamer types that he’s explored in previous films, but few come across as anything other than one-note here. Calva’s progression from starstruck wanna-be to unscrupulous studio suit, for instance, doesn’t have enough of the build-up required to come off as anything close to convincing – it feels like we’re missing about three or four key moments on the timeline of his narrative that would really sell his journey across the movie (compare his arc to the centralized narrative that Miles Teller’s stop-at-nothing character goes through in WHIPLASH for a similar trajectory that’s far more effective). Most of the characters here feel similarly thin – motivation is pretty flat, stakes are low, there are some occasional flashes of compelling characterization, mostly with Pitt’s aging star unable to adapt to the talkies, and Adepo’s jazz musician navigating a racist industry, but these aren’t developed as far as they could’ve been (and I won’t say what it is of course, but the destination that Pitt’s character ends up at just felt so cheap and lazy), and unfortunately, I think that undoes a good chunk of the underlying sense of sadness that Chazelle is going for, and that the film’s ending is suggesting has been there all along.

Still, there’s lots to love here and despite my reservations, I could see my stance on this one shifting as time goes on – this is a weird enough final product that it may just need a second viewing later on down the road to help shape, punctuate and refine some of the points that felt rough or wobbly this first go-round.

This review may contain spoilers.

aka Pics or it didn’t happen

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is a flying saucer,” a military rep smugly announces to a crowded room of self-professed UFO witnesses in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. He’s referring, of course, to a photograph of a toy frisbee, but (naturally) his words go over like a certifiable lead balloon, and a barrage of overlapping exasperated voices quickly fills the air. One of them - Richard Dreyfuss’ character - exclaims, “Excuse me sir, I didn’t want to see this,” but instead of being outrightly dismissed, the other military attaché in the room leans forward and curiously replies, “I sure wish I had.” It might be nothing – perhaps just an attempt to calm the tension in the room rather than a comment made in absolute sincerity, but it's a moment, one of a number, that gets a lovely little payoff later on down the road.

Dreyfuss may exit the movie by abandoning his family to go star-hopping, but the last image we have of Melinda Dillon’s character Jillian – the single mother of an abducted son, and who, like Dreyfuss, didn't want to see any of this – is a closeup of her with a small pocket camera, snapping a roll of covert photos of the doe-eyed alien creatures and their behemoth mothership. On one hand, it's physical proof of what she’s experienced for her own sanity, but presumably, there’s an additional underlying implication here that she may just wind up leaking the photos to the world – it's a small but satisfying payoff to both her own dismissed story and to the others who haven't been believed. Now, it may just be entirely cynical (especially for a movie that ends on a note so steeped in childlike wonder that its score literally samples a portion of “When You Wish Upon a Star”), but imagine for a moment where a character like hers could go once the end credits finish rolling.

Take that moment of her nabbing pics, twist it into something a tad sinister, and follow it to its logical conclusion – there’s a disturbed sequel somewhere out there where Dillon not only makes a fortune selling the photos to the highest bidder, but becomes a bona-fide celebrity off of her survivor status. She goes on to interview with every outlet, every newspaper, every magazine, every talk show; she parades her abducted-and-returned son around like he’s the eighth wonder of the world; there’s a book deal, TV movie, brand deals, paid appearances, publicity tour; maybe she even just starts giving exclusive tours out at Devil’s Tower where she was one of the few witnesses to the world’s greatest laser light show years prior – “Step right up folks, this is where it all happened!” Again, it’s deeply cynical, but isn’t that the exact kind of thing that you could see happening?

That’s the territory that NOPE, Peele’s weirdest and most ambitious feature to date, is trafficking in – a spectacle-filled popcorn thriller about the very idea and form of spectacle itself and the way that it can consume all in its path. It’s commonplace that we all innately view the world around us through a lens that’s informed by the images that we see in movies or on television or on our phones (and not even images that we’ve necessarily experienced directly; I’d bet good money that loads of people, when confronted with the words “flying saucer”, will instinctually jump to the spacecraft found in Ray Harryhausen’s EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS even if they’ve only seen images from it and not the actual movie itself). It’s often just how we make sense of things – but we also invariably have this ability to turn everything into pumped-up spectacle. We revere the way that an artist can turn the grief and pain that they’ve suffered into some kind of transformative, healing work, but if people are capable of turning trauma into art, then they’re just as capable of turning it into a circus, twisting it to the point of exploiting whatever horrors they’ve endured – and honestly, the line between the two is probably a lot blurrier than we’d care to it.

Yeun’s character and extended flashback sequence (masterfully directed with a heaping amount of restraint) is going to get loads of flak from folks who view it as not much more than an unnecessary deviation from Kaluuya/Palmer’s storyline. They’re game to try and convince me otherwise, but as far as I’m concerned, the movie as a whole would be gutted without it as it speaks directly to this very idea (and may just arguably represent the heart of the movie too). When we first meet him, Yeun relates the story of that horrific day on set through the filter of an SNL sketch that was based upon it as though it’s the only way he can bear to relive it, but of course he’s simultaneously built a shrine out of it that he exploits for profit, and then of course, goes on to ultimately recreate the same bloodcurdling moment for public consumption on a significantly larger scale (worth noting too that the fact that Peele does this without twisting Yeun into a textbook villain in the process is so gratifying and even rather impressive). Trauma™ can be a business after all – a product and a spectacle in and of itself that people will continually line up in droves to soak up, but the consequences of spectacle (and/or the pursuit of spectacle) can be, as we witness, devouring. Elsewhere, and perhaps played just a touch too on the nose, there’s the cinematographer and the TMZ stooge - one an artist, the other a hack - who both meet their demise in the blinding pursuit of capturing the perfect shot. We spin horror into opportunity and we shouldn’t be surprised when it eats us alive.

Anyway, this is wild stuff, and it keeps getting better the more that I think about it – the trio of Kaluuya, Palmer and Perea are all excellent, van Hoytema’s sweeping photography is gorgeous (those night scenes are impossibly beautiful), and the tonal shifts are handled really smoothly, this one morphing its way from horror into a western-inflected sci-fi romp, certainly Peele’s most rollicking outing yet. I love that he’s being given a blank check to do whatever he wants. Keep it coming man.

Mad indeed. Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting brought to life by Terry Gilliam, Alan Moore, Jim Henson and the Quay brothers after a week-long bender through Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell that, in a previous life, was destined to end up on a dusty shelf of sun-faded VHS tapes at a rundown video store, all minutely crafted by the kind of indelible weirdo that the film industry could use far more of. I mean, to say nothing else at all, the craft here is often just gobsmacking, and at its best - its early scenes in particular - it flows with a kind of lulling, mesmeric effect as its Assassin wanders through a lost and forgotten Zone-style world not entirely dissimilar to STALKER or even the exploratory ship-searching sequences in ALIEN and PROMETHEUS. To probably no one’s surprise, it’s as nihilistic as they come – the world is a filthy underground nightmare, violence churns along in perpetual cycles that cannot be interrupted, slaves are created and then crushed when they get in the way, the leaders are all petulant babies, the map sent from the heavens above quickly dissolves into pieces, and even if everything’s torn down and re-started, it’ll just end up falling to bits again and again and again. It’s a vision that feels completely and refreshingly raw and unfiltered, likely made by someone long pissed off at the world and everything in it, and although its bleakness unmoderated by any trace of levity can prove rather unrelenting and wearing, the fact that this exists at all is kind of amazing, and I'm thrilled that it's out in the world.

...now we all just need to start a GoFundMe for Yuri Norstein so that he can finally finish THE OVERCOAT.

Not necessarily a statement on the film's quality (for what it's worth, I'd put this at second place when ranking Harryhausen's three Sinbad features - above GOLDEN VOYAGE but just below 7TH VOYAGE) but one of the most interesting things here is the curious little conundrum of film history/culture that it brings up. As it's been well-noted, this came out a few months after STAR WARS, and doubtless, felt completely out of date - like the sci-fi/fantasy world had suddenly been jolted forward in a way that left something like EYE OF THE TIGER feeling behind the times and rather like a relic in SW's massive wake. And it's not too difficult to see why: for one, even though they were both drawn from a similar well of mythic sources and adventure serials, there's a hokey children's chapterbook tone present within nearly all of Harryhausen's movies that Lucas mostly avoided, instead grounding STAR WARS with a semblance of grit and darkness that gave it a modern edge. There's certainly a swashbuckling joyfulness to both, but EYE OF THE TIGER (again, like all of Harryhausen's) definitely veers pretty heavily in the direction of straight-up cheese, or at the very least a kind of heightened theatrical costume-drama Old Hollywood vibe*.

Second, of course, was ILM's giant leap forward with the visual effects and blue-screen work that just blew Harryhausen's film out of the water. EYE OF THE TIGER is an odd one amongst Ray's films in that it features what's likely the very best of his stop-motion creature work with the prince-turned-baboon and the troglodyte ranking among the subtlest and most lifelike of all his creations (that scene where the baboon examines its reflection in the mirror is such a quiet little marvel; incidentally, next to MIGHTY JOE YOUNG's title character, the baboon and trog are two on the very short list of sympathetic protagonists that Harryhausen animated - the majority being mostly terrifying monsters from space, the sea or the prehistoric world), but next to it, the worst of his blue-screen shots. For as charming as even the weakest of his stop-motion sequences can be, the travelling matte systems he worked with rendered quite a few dodgy results over the years, and TIGER is the most glaring offender – there’s a particularly ropey shot in the third act, to pick just one example, that has all the actors shot in front of a blue-screen in order to be shrunk down ant-size before a giant JURASSIC PARK-style entrance gate, and the matte lines around them from where they were composited in are so rough that it's like someone took a crayon to the negative and just drew a green outline around each figure.

All that to say, I've been going through Harryhausen's movies recently for a video that I'm working on, and this was on my mind the whole time while revisiting this one, and I wanted to write a little about it since the video I'm making goes in a different direction and doesn't cover this idea in specifics. It's just one of those curious things about the evolution of genres – Harryhausen's movies were one of the many things very much in the background of STAR WARS (when Ray died, Lucas even said something to the effect of, "Without Ray Harryhausen, there'd likely be no STAR WARS"), and yet there are weird occasions like this where a new film advances its genre in a way that can make a key influence - who just so happens to release a film in the same year - feel immediately out of date (the learner becomes the master, if you want to be entirely cornball about it). Jump forward about twenty years and you could probably argue that a similar thing occured in 1999 albeit with Lucas now in the position Harryhausen occupied in '77 when the jolt of fresh sci-fi energy that revolutionized the genre was delivered by THE MATRIX rather than THE PHANTOM MENACE which, in comparison, just felt a bit unexciting and even old hat, not dissimilar to the way a lot of folks felt about EYE OF THE TIGER in relation to A NEW HOPE, despite the STAR WARS films being one of the many key sources in the background of the Wachowskis' work. Different genre of course, but 2002 had a similar curious example when the ultra-silly DIE ANOTHER DAY was trounced by THE BOURNE IDENTITY's grounded kineticism that brought the spy genre into the 21st century and made Bond (a series very much in the background of Bourne) feel totally antiquated – so much so that CASINO ROYALE, as people have pointed out for years, felt like a major remixing and response to the grittiness of the Bourne films. I'm curious if anyone can think of other cases like this that are similar.

*Just to be clear, I don’t at all mean this as a negative criticism of Harryhausen’s films. On the contrary, I’ll gladly take their overripe charm any day of the week.

A real wonder – one of those experiences I have only a couple of times a year of being instantly grabbed from the first frame and held completely for the whole duration of a movie. Grand, imposing images abound with Welles filtering Kafka's absurdism through a slight German Expressionist lens and getting incredible mileage in the process out of the Eastern Bloc brutalist architecture standing in for a wasteland of mindless mass order and structure. To pick just one example, that army of worker bee drones clacking away at their desks and then rising together in unison at the end of the workday is staged so strikingly - it's practically like something out of a Jacques Tati movie. In fact, the dark comedy here would make it a great double-feaure with PLAYTIME, or even Gilliam's BRAZIL or Billy Wilder's underrated Cold War comedy ONE, TWO, THREE. This is, of course, far more surreal than any of those - with Anthony Perkins careening his way through a world where tiny tower rooms inexplicably open into hallways lined with file cabinets that stretch for miles, where everyone's always queuing for lord knows what, where the gutted innards of warehouses overflowing with mountains of paperwork are the only landscape in sight, and where you can be accused of a crime but never clued in on what the actual charge is. In the same way, every shot itself has an off-kilter, absurdist touch with steal beams and shadows invading the frame, jutting every which way, and with characters who are constantly framed ultra-low or who tower over everything, often lending a massive and uncanny sense of height and depth to any particular setup. Every bit of this feels like an unhinged Welles unattached from the studio system and let loose - that rebellious buccaneer spirit of his rampaging at full force to shatter the rules and turn convention on its head, but crucially, managing to do so without the whole thing coming across like some vanity project. I've still got a small handful of his films to get through, but for me, this is right up there very near CITIZEN KANE.

Nice chapter in Powell & Pressburger's lineup of Technicolor Fairy Tales, expanding on the sensuality and romanticism of BLACK NARCISSUS and THE RED SHOES, and pre-empting to some degree what they went on to do in THE TALES OF HOFFMANN, but this time exploring a particular folkloric atmosphere that's not that many steps away from the storybook fantasy of an early Disney feature or the kind of grown-up fairy tale that you could see Guillermo del Toro tackling, all of it -- right from the very start with the shot of that tree, twisted and deformed into the mangled shape of a wolf -- made all the more intoxicating by its Archers-trademark gorgeous photography (can we bring three-strip Technicolor back, please?). Probably stumbles a bit along the way - such a specific, heightened tone like the one P&P set about crafting obviously only worked successfully when performed by a cast able to match that melodramatic air without just looking silly, and for the most part, things pan out. P&P regulars David Farrar and Cyril Cusack hit the right note, but Jennifer Jones and her wild flower child really wobbles between convincingly innocent and just plain irksome - she hits the former more than the latter, but still, I'd have liked to see another actress in the role. I imagine that her casting was probably more a result of David O. Selznick's involvement here rather than a spot of inspired casting from Powell & Pressburger and their team (I could be wrong, that's only a guess on my part, but production on this did start just weeks after Jones became the new Mrs. Selznick after all, plus David O. went on to pull a trademark move of his own by not only slicing the movie to bits for its American release but also apparently had a bunch of new closeups of Jones added in just because. What a guy). Slight shame since it probably keeps it out of the upper echelon of P&P's work, but hey, even minor P&P is better than just about everything else.

Not sure if Raimi's signature style -- all the snap zooms, dolly zooms, split diopters, comic violence, flash montages, ultra-wide dutch angles and close-ups, etc. -- necessarily translates well here. It's entertaining moment to moment, and there's some really excellent staging/camerawork that builds off of the wild kinetic shots he employed in ARMY OF DARKNESS, but honestly this feels like a case of clashing forces, like everybody on-set was making a different movie. The attempts at more of a manic Leone-style Spaghetti Western really don't mesh well with the story's grasps at pathos or whatever prestige picture most of the actors seem to think they're in, so a lot of this - Stone's Woman With No Name and her unintentionally silly flashbacks especially - just kinda fell flat for me. I dunno, I'm guessing this was probably ushered into production off the back of UNFORGIVEN's huge success (and then wound up ing the ranks of other 1990s prestige Western flops alongside WYATT EARP, GERONIMO, and RIDE WITH THE DEVIL), but I think this would've been better served by stripping away the cerebral element and the appeals to emotion, upping that Raimi kinetic charm into overdrive, and going for more of a down and dirty B-movie rather than the comic/classical mish-mash that this winds up being (it's also one of those interesting cases where you kinda wish that the story had shifted its focus to one of its vastly more interesting side characters, in this case DiCaprio's charismatic Kid). Can't help but wonder if Raimi took the film's muted response as at least partial cause for dialing things back for his next film, A SIMPLE PLAN, where a quieter lens not only really served the story well but was something that he excelled at - that one is still in my mind the great unsung Raimi masterwork.

Not a big superhero guy but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel any affection for the Batman films and the zig-zagging evolution they've gone through over the years, although I have to it that I'm glad to see Snyder & Affleck's Crossfit bro exchanged for a caped crusader a couple steps closer to Nolan & Bale's. If anything, this actually feels like the better follow-up to THE DARK KNIGHT and its Patriot Act/Iraq-era domestic terror paranoia, taking the germ of RISES' Occupy undertones and shifting it into a hard-boiled sins of the father conspiracy game unfolding as a movement rises from the ashes against the privileged elite led by a live-streaming troll turned antifa-style psychopath who preaches retribution to a vulnerable underclass of the trampled and unwanted, all while a brooding emo orphan tries to stand in between them and the city he says he loves but feels is slipping away as secrets from the past threaten to unravel everything and force him to contend with just who the real villains are here, all of it filtered through a Fincher-inflected lens (it wears that SE7EN - ZODIAC influence probably just a bit too much but eh, whatever) with traces of THE FRENCH CONNECTION and ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN existing somewhere in the background too.

It's probably too long, there's probably not enough Andy Serkis in it, and a streamlined narrative that keeps the Riddler as the primary villain rather than kinda forgetting that he exists during the story's second hour would've probably served the film better, but still, there's loads here that I really dug. Pattinson brings a real sense of pain to the role, the likes of which we've rarely seen before - he's easily the most unhinged and affected Bruce Wayne we've seen with any trace of the playboy-persona (even a fake, put-on version of it) utterly decimated - a traumatized antisocial loner as close as we've ever seen to being the other side of the coin with the costumed freaks he rails against, with little other than his own driving obsession to steer him forwards. The latter aspect there slots in so nicely with this film's emphasis on the procedural - I know other people have mentioned it, but this is the most detective-y that any of these has ever been. Loved how small scale the majority of it was too - so much of it playing out in clubs and backrooms and at Gotham PD -- although because of that, I'm ittedly less sure about how big the story suddenly balloons to in of scale in its final movement. Like RISES and its nuclear bomb, there's a feeling of things suddenly being turned up to eleven here that didn't quite ring so well, in my opinion.

Initially felt the same way about the constant shallow focus in every other shot too, but I wound up coming around to it as it's really complemented well by Matt Reeves and DP Greig Fraser (who, between this and DUNE, is seriously on the road towards god-tier status) not only composing the action primarily in wides but especially by the heavy interplay between the background and foreground of numerous compositions - a good number of shots here build towards a climax of action or horror that winds up playing out somewhere in the out of focus background, the effect of which is almost always rendered entirely unsettling (there's probably some kind of dorky dissertation to be written here as well that argues Reeves/Peter Craig/Fraser intended the constantly shallow depth of field to not just be an aesthetic choice but as some kind of marriage between story and style -- the constant separation between the fore/background reflecting the story's fixation on the separation between the elite and the downtrodden that culminates with the collision between them, sorta reminiscent of what Cuaron, Lubezki and co. did in CHILDREN OF MEN, but eh... I'm too lazy to write it)

Finally got around to this one -- feels like the combination of two of the core ideas that've run through Peter Jackson's career: the uncovering of lost relics from LORD OF THE RINGS, FORGOTTEN SILVER and even KING KONG, but perhaps more interestingly, the ultra behind the scenes looks that have accompanied each of his films for nearly thirty years. To my knowledge, Jackson was one of the first directors to really take full advantage of what home video releases could offer, releasing extensive behind the scenes footage first with the laserdisc of THE FRIGHTENERS but then especially with the LOTR and KONG dvds* that weren't just snippets of b-roll to be pieced together into featurettes but fly on the wall style pieces where small documentary crews hung out and captured the minutiae of the day-to-day production processes amongst the hundreds of people who made the films possible (the three docs Costa Botes did for LOTR are still some of the most addictive and intricate bts docs ever made). In that regard, THE BEATLES: GET BACK feels remarkably in line with both Jackson's own work and the work he's been associated with, boasting a hyper-observational approach to a creative process that's often grinding, messy, headache-inducing, relationship-straining, but undeniably fun and occasionally beautiful -- watching Paul come up with the first strains of Get Back on the spot is kinda dumbfounding. Jackson's never been a stranger to excess and extravagance (this is, after all, his third trilogy in twenty years) but for the most part, I found the prolonged approach almost entirely enjoyable - like having a long jam session with your best buds. Wish they hadn't been so aggressive with the DNR on this and had maintained that 16mm texture - like THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD, wide shots here are often breathtaking but closeups slightly off-putting with faces rendered unnaturally waxy, but ehhhh, it's not the biggest deal in the world.

*THE HOBBIT deserves a mention as well - think what you will about those three films but the degree of transparency present within their bts docs revolving around the series' rough and tumble pre-production, Ian McKellen's near-breakdown from the green-screen shooting conditions, and Jackson's own anxieties about the production that stemmed from the ridiculously tiny amount of time he was afforded to prep three massive hulking blockbusters is, I think, just plain irable.

Don't have too much to add to what I've seen others already say – like VICE, this is about as amusing as being flipped off by a nitwit high-schooler for 2+ hours, but for as meanspirited as that film was, at least it had a handful of leftover gags from THE BIG SHORT that kept it somewhat engaging -- the mid-film end credits roll, the Cheneys swapping Macbeth-esque dialogue, etc. -- whereas the only sign of formal playfulness DON'T LOOK UP can muster is in its interminably sloppy intercutting that refuses to let any particular scene just be a scene for reasons that escape me which, I dunno, I guess wouldn't be as bad if this wasn't as meandering and just simply unfunny as it is, taking pretty much nothing but the easiest potshots imaginable. Spent a lot of this thinking about how every joke and comment here about government ineptitude, the vapid empty consumerist lures of social media, and the empty-headedness of mob mentality were all done infinitely better ten years ago in PARKS & REC where the cast/crew managed to be insightful, biting, and just plain comical without sinking into the snarky and condescending territory McKay and co. slip into here.

Anderson takes PHANTOM THREAD's swirling structure with the leads repeatedly falling in and out of sync with one another and sets it in the middle of a nostalgic hangout movie à la AMERICAN GRAFFITI that resounds in every direction with melancholy and youthful joy, and that has such a microscopic touch running all the way through it. He's gotta be one of the best modern directors at extracting every bit of nuance possible within the close-up; haven't seen this much care and attention placed on the actor's faces since I don't know when. And as a twentysomething screw-up who modulates constantly between feeling weighed down by the pressure to get his act together and just giving in to the pursuit of something risky and silly and that will probably fail but that feels somehow righter than anything else, man did this hit home. Sometimes a movie just feels made for you...

I apologize to everyone now for the gushing video I'll probably end up making that'll the ranks of all the other obnoxious FilmBros squealing about this.

Went into this blind without having read the novel nor having watched the '47 film, and really kinda fell for the first hour and its casual vibe, so much so that everything afterwards (post-time jump) felt like a downward shift - solidly constructed and always watchable but nowhere as engaging. Plus, that carnival setting is just simply the most obvious and perfect stomping ground for del Toro's gleeful interest in the grotesque - production design/art direction here is delectable - but is also where the most life is found in an ensemble of scrungy characters; the trio of Dafoe, Collette, and Strathairn come out the strongest here, whereas Cooper - who I almost always like - feels miscast, capturing Stan's serpentine sinister edge but lacking the character's bright-eyed youthful ambition in the story's first half that guides him towards the boisterous huckster showmanship he embodies in the back half (and he really *really* oversells that final scene in the most unsubtle DO YOU GET IT??? way possible). Honestly would've loved to see del Toro throw away the novel's plot and just do a nice little carnival hangout movie instead. Nothing much would need to happen, but Cate Blanchett would still be welcome to show up and inject a little camp. Who needs plot when you have Willem Dafoe instructing a new recruit in all the carny ways and showing off his collection of bottled fetuses?

Real solid base here - a manic take on EYES WIDE SHUT-esque infidelity for the age that spawned photo hacks, Tinder, and OnlyFans, strewn across a depraved landscape masking itself in self-righteous post-MeToo hypersensitivity that's quickly coming apart at its own increasingly paranoid seams, all with some really well-executed observations and ticks (can't tell you the amount of conversations I've had with agent/producer types who've all used some variation of the phrase "we're excited!" multiple times in the span of a few minutes), but the end result winds up feeling like an overstuffed first draft that doesn't quite coalesce so well - a lot of good pieces that lack the overall focus that could've sharpened its bite. Really would've liked to see a tighter narrative that hones in exclusively on Cummings' character and his spiral out of control without the unnecessary deviations that it takes with side-characters - that pre-title introduction, for instance, seems out of place, making for a scattered, wobbly opening where, ideally it should instead be instantly arresting and alluring. Still, Jim remains one of the most ionate and interesting voices working in indie film today and I'll happily watch anything that he makes.

Lovely to see Steven deliver on the promise of TEMPLE OF DOOM's opening scene. Musicals may be box-office poison again but at least they're going out on such a gorgeous jolt of energy - gonna go and study the immaculate fluidity of the composition and staging in every last shot of this thing because good lord is it among Spielberg and Kaminski's best work.

Wes, you can't just sneak in a hand-drawn animated short into the middle of this movie's climax without expecting me to begin campaigning for you to direct a full-on hand-drawn feature -- c'mon now, the world needs it.

Pretty sure my face broke from smiling during this. May not be Anderson at his most emotionally resonant but it's him at the very height of his visual powers. The sheer imagination and inventiveness on display is exhilarating - ever since FANTASTIC MR. FOX, the construction of his baroque pop worlds have come to rest more and more on tangible visual effects -- models, miniatures, matte paintings, stop-motion / hand-drawn animation, differing aspect ratios -- and FRENCH DISPATCH may just be the furthest that he's gone down that road, stuffing every tableau to the brim and throwing everything he possibly can at the screen in a way that's often overwhelming but is utterly delightful in every moment.

Visually speaking, this is as gargantuan as anything that David Lean made in his late career, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and RYAN'S DAUGHTER in particular, and it's as beautifully realized and rendered as you could ask for, combining Lean's grandeur with the lived-in grit and grim Lucas brought to STAR WARS and Tarkovsky to SOLARIS.

It's as portentous and weighty as you could imagine (and then some), and so utterly steeped in mythology in a way that's simultaneously riveting and frustrating. I haven't read Herbert's novel so I could be off-base with this, but I have a hard time believing that this is all that watered-down in the sheer intricate structuring of the world when compared to the novel. It works best when following the story of a kid putting on a brave face while reckoning with the fact that he may just be the messiah (which is interesting since BLADE RUNNER 2049 did the opposite, following someone coming to grips with the fact that they're not the chosen one after all), but a good few stretches of this wind up feeling like someone reading you the LOTR Appendices instead of the actual story itself -- mythology for the sake of mythology. Still, you have to give the suits at WB credit for not getting weak at the knees over all the gobbledygook crammed into these 2+ hours. For as vocal as Denis was this time last year about their sudden theatrical/streaming hybrid release announcement (which he was totally justified in complaining about), at least they didn't pull the same kind of crap that Dino De Laurentiis did with Lynch and just slice his movie to incomprehensible bits - so, credit where credit is due, I guess.

Still, it's hard to fully get a feeling for this Part One alone without the context of where things will go in the second film. By itself, this one feels mostly like a giant prologue, setting up a long string of plot devices that'll get paid off later on down the road which, I dunno, I guess is fine considering that that's the direction a lot of big genre content is going in these days - preferring serialized films that are so tightly connected to their follow-ups that they hardly have a leg of their own to really stand on, as opposed to something like, say FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING which managed to lay huge groundwork, establish its relationships, move its chess pieces, and raise the stakes all with its own individual emotional payoff and a sense of roundedness, i.e. it worked as both a standalone film and as a part of a trilogy. My feeling could change but right now DUNE - PART ONE feels exactly like its final line of dialogue -- "This is just the beginning..."

Those sandworms though. Villeneuve kills at doing massive scale.

Fascinating, of course, for being the first Bond film made with the knowledge of it being the actor's final round with the character - and it mostly honors and fulfills that prerogative. Dynamite first half with a fairly by-the-numbers denouement, Rami's kinda lame, and it continues this current incarnation's tension-filled relationship with the traditional Bond formula that's teetered across five films between rejecting it and awkwardly side-hugging it -- this one coming down somewhere in the middle and winding up feeling more like a somber MISSION: IMPOSSBLE movie than anything else (minus that mini KNIVES OUT reunion with Ana de Armas that's easily the standout setpiece of the whole thing).

Still, the Craig entries - for all their ups and downs - have been the story of a sarcastic alcoholic killing machine confronting the demon of having watched nearly everyone around him die a horrible death that he couldn't stop, and being pummeled into doing a bit of growing up -- and for as much as the Bond purists will likely detest it -- I've kinda loved the emotional arc, however jagged it may be, stretching from CASINO ROYALE to this film's logical endpoint. Feels weird to say, but NO TIME TO DIE's feels like a mature James Bond. Obviously they're gonna keep making these until the sun burns out, but it's hard to see another run of these being this compelling.

"What an ugly town this has become..."

Excellent thriller that's as compelling for its historical context as it is for its Corman-brand low-budget techniques, melding Vietnam-era angst and headline-grabbing acts of violence like the 1966 UT tower shooting with the story of an old horror icon reckoning with a world he no longer understands or even wants to. Wild that this also somehow predicted the kind of exploitation horror that would come to dominate the 1970s in the form of titles like THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN, and HALLOWEEN where monsters and ghouls in old dark castles ("Camp! High camp!" as Orlok's critics sneer) were replaced by unstoppable forces of nature that could not be understood or reasoned with. Honestly, it really ought to be mentioned in the same breath as PSYCHO and PEEPING TOM as a key fulcrum point in the evolution of the genre.

Wish Bogdanovich (who's actually really good in his small role here) had directed more thrillers* - this is easily among the best directorial debuts to emerge from the Roger Corman Film School and he showed a real knack for the genre. That slow zoom towards and into the drive-in screen revealing the shooter sitting just behind it for instance -- chilling stuff. But it's Orlok's on-screen character and the man himself disorienting the shooter by slowly approaching from both the left and the right that's the scene for the ages, and that's modulated just right too. The build-up is so well-executed and the moment itself played with just the right amount of seriousness that prevents it from slipping into comical territory. Plus, Karloff (in what may now be my favorite of his performances) just sells it completely with that final line: "Is *that* what I was afraid of?"

*Still, imagine having the kind of run that Bogdanovich went on to have in his career right after this: TARGETS --> THE LAST PICTURE SHOW --> WHAT'S UP DOC? --> PAPER MOON. I mean, good lord.

Nasty piece of work with a jet-black heart and soul that rampages and roars its way across the screen, and the twisted brother to Godard's BREATHLESS, released only a handful of months before this – both very much about the banality of evil and a run-down world that leaves discontented bored youths smirking and shrugging at the destruction they've left in their wake – but where BREATHLESS gives its characters ample time to meander and ramble, THE WARPED ONES races forwards like a bat out of hell. That opening twenty minute movement especially is among the fastest I've seen in quite a while – whirling, spinning and whip-panning every which way – the camera and the characters constantly flailing about like a manic jazz number turned up to eleven. Morally repugnant (obviously) but – perhaps more important – set in a world where redemption has no place. Actually feels very much like the dangerous and deeply-troubling version of JOKER that people wanted or convinced themselves that that movie actually was and that a bunch of journalists engaged in embarrassing outrage/concern over.

no country for old men...

Still have quite a few of their films to get through, but every time I see this one, it gets better and better, and the more I become convinced that it's Powell & Pressburger's enduring masterpiece (or at the very least that it's shoulder to shoulder with THE RED SHOES). After consecutive propaganda films in 49TH PARALLEL and ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING, it's fascinating to see P&P craft a narrative that reckons with and dares to challenge the actions and legacy of their country all while the war was still raging on, and it's entirely amusing to read that Winston Churchill actually objected to its release - odd since the film still obviously veers pretty heavily in the direction of pride and affection for England, which just makes you wonder what it was specifically that Churchill reacted so negatively to -- the presence of Anton Walbrook's "good German", the film's suggestion that the war was in part brought about because of 's treatment post-WWI, the mere invocation of the pompous and zealous Blimp stereotype, or some combination of all three.

Struck this time by just how much Clive and Theo's friendship surely mirrored that of Powell and Pressburger's - the former a ionate and boisterous idealist, and the latter a quiet and hyper-intelligent German ex-pat who fled his home country as Nazism began taking root - both pairs inseparable sets of brothers whose friendship was a hallmark of their lives. You write what you know, I suppose.

Also, the progress of time denoted by an increasing number of mounted heads from hunting trips accompanied by rifle blasts remains one of my favorite transitions across time in any movie ever.

Will probably need to see this one again, but on the first viewing alone it feels staggering - a gorgeous and lyrical dark fantasy that flows with grace and fervor, and whose dourness is effectively mitigated by flashes of horror and humor -- was genuinely surprised both at how chilling it was and at how many laughs it features. Could probably do with some tightening up in its mid-section, but this is very much David Lowery at the top of his game, firing on all cylinders -- his idiosyncratic tendencies as a storyteller pretty darn well matched to the misty, magical landscape he and his team create. If you thought having Rooney Mara sit on that kitchen floor and eat a pie for five solid minutes was a Choice, just wait till you see some of the cards he's got up his sleeve here.

Thanks for doing Texas filmmakers proud buddy.

The shivery, dread-inducing offspring of David Fincher and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, THE EMPTY MAN is one of those genuine head-scratchers somehow conceived within the studio system but that was probably always destined to enter the world as a lost gem. It's a real shame that this was lost amid the Disney/Fox merger and then almost completely buried upon its lackluster release during the pandemic - I don't even seeing a single ad for it at all. Had a distributor like A24 gotten ahold of this, it'd have been a smash hit. Easy to see why Fox lost any confidence they had in it though - it's slow and methodical with a chilly atmosphere to boot that's far more interested in the sensual, in rhythm and in texture than in mindless jump scares. May not boast the strongest narrative, but the craft here is impeccable - it's incredibly meticulous and clinical and tightly wound and altogether engrossing because of it. Hope people keep throwing money David Prior's way - can't wait to see what he does next.

This review may contain spoilers.

From afar, this is sorta irable because I do think you could do a good version of A FACE IN THE CROWD for Generation TikTok, but up close this just feels entirely toothless, and it's not just the tired "Internet = Dangerous" punchline but that so much of it comes across as hollow and out of touch. For one, who on earth is the audience for the faux game-show concept that Garfield, Hawke and Wolff's characters cook up in an age of vlogs and podcasts and livestreams? It's like someone made a movie about YouTube and their only research was looking at whatever's on the Trending page: "Well, I always see Kimmel and Fallon getting lots of views, so that *must* be the zeitgeist!"

Andrew Garfield gives it his all, but his character's JACKASS-esque antics - running around with *that* strapped to his crotch, defecating on-camera, and (in the film's big third act moral transgression) releasing a fan's unedited photo online - just feel positively tame compared to all of the capital-letter Scandals that the YouTube influencers the movie is satirizing have been involved in over the last handful of years (and in some cases have profited off of), including and especially when That One Douchebag not only genuinely didn't understand that filming a dead body and posting it online in order to sell merch to his teenybopper audience was the very definition of unethical but then went on to monetize every step of his own supposed redemption arc. Nothing MAINSTREAM has comes even close to approaching the level of repugnance that it aims for.

Furthermore, having the trio of Garfield, Hawke and Wolff be self-aware and intelligent enough to construct a persona that satirizes narcissistic and irresponsible online stars almost completely undermines any moral downfall in the film's back half - particularly for Hawke's character. If you're intelligent enough to create that kind of persona, then you clearly have to have a pretty good understanding of what that persona consists of - therefore, why would all of the destructive and repugnant behavior that's so inherently associated with that kind of persona shock you in the least bit? It doesn't make sense to have her knowingly create a narcissist and then be upset when he starts acting narcissistic. It's the equivalent of creating a superhero and then acting surprised when they knock some buildings down. A more unsettling version of the story, I think, would end with Hawke's character remaining by Garfield's side in a kind of detached "Whatever. Viewers are stupid and they'll keep watching whatever I put out" mentality rather than having her run away in a half-baked moral panic.

// based on the overall quality of the movie of course, not just Harryhausen's visual effects work | not including any of the short films or the sequence that he and Willis O'Brien animated for Irwin Allen's THE ANIMAL WORLD \\

1. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
2. 20 Million Miles to Earth
3. Jason and the Argonauts
4. Mysterious Island
5. First Men in the Moon
6. Clash of the Titans
7. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
8. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
9. The Valley of Gwangi
10. Mighty Joe Young

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Re-posting this a year later after some slight re-structuring. Replaced FIRST MAN with ANNIHILATION, and shifted the order of the back five around a bit.

1. Isle of Dogs
2. Roma
3. Night Is Short, Walk On Girl
4. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
5. Leave No Trace
6. Annihilation
7. The Old Man & the Gun
8. They Shall Not Grow Old
9. Mirai
10. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

1. The Irishman
2. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
3. Transit
4. Uncut Gems
5. A Hidden Life
6. Us
7. Parasite
8. I Lost My Body
9. The Nightingale
10. Knives Out

Waited until I saw a few more limited releases to create this list. I'm very curious to see what I'll think of it in a year's time. Those top three especially are all fairly interchangeable- I'd be happy with any single one taking the top spot.

1. Dunkirk
2. Blade Runner 2049
3. Phantom Thread
4. Lady Bird
5. The Post
6. The Florida Project
7. Baby Driver
8. The Lost City of Z
9. After the Storm
10. Nocturama

Just a quick and necessary re-ordering as things have changed in the year since I made this list. Took out both MIDNIGHT SPECIAL and KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, and added in a couple I didn't see until 2017.

1. Silence
2. La La Land
3. Notes on Blindness
4. Certain Women
5. 10 Cloverfield Lane
6. Embrace of the Serpent
7. Cameraperson
8. 20th Century Women
9. April and the Extraordinary World
10. Sing Street

Two universities. Six degree changes. Two feature-film projects. Eleven festival rejections. Thirty-seven hundred cups of coffee (roughly). Freshman fifteen. Sophomore negative-forty. One-hundred and sixteen trips to the theater. Nearly one-thousand movies watched.

Five years.

And eleven films to sum the whole thing up.

(You better read the notes for this, otherwise it won't make a lick of sense)

• The Tree of Life

  June of '11, I was a fresh high-school grad, and one sunny afternoon, I strolled into the Angelika in downtown Dallas, unprepared for what was about to happen.

  In a real hoity-toity way, 'The Tree of Life' was almost like steady preparation for the years about to hit me, giving me something of a picture of what lay beyond the approaching horizon-- it was scary because it felt so real, it was strange because I'd never seen anything like it before, it was confusing because memories often are, it was beautiful because it was alive, and it was exciting because it left me changed.

  The only other people in the theater were two older women who sat directly behind me. When the credits began to silently roll, one turned to the other and murmured, 'What the hell was all that about?'. Trust me, ma'am- I've been thinking about that exact question for five years now, and I've had a hell of a time doing it.

• Castle in the Sky

  I hated living on campus my freshman year, but if I hadn't have lived there, then I would've never retreated to the library and claimed a specific desk, tucked away in a quiet corner in the maze-like first floor, as my own.

  I spent way too many hours at that desk that year, but the two best were spent getting utterly and completely lost in Miyazaki's joyful world of sky pirates, ancient prophecies, magical spells, and unabashed adventure. I felt like a little kid in the absolute best, most innocent way- and I still do, whenever I watch this or any of Miyazaki's genius storybook tales.

• Hud

  In the summer of 2012, my friends and I shot a road movie all throughout God's country- Texas, for the uninitiated. Day after day, we piled into our lead actor's pickup and scoured old cowtown streets, hopping out at a moment's notice to grab shots at spots that looked atmospheric or cinematic or just cool.

  One day, we did a long wide take where the pickup pulls off a road and into a dusty parking lot. Just on the other side of the road were railroad tracks, and by some great miracle, coincidence, or just sheer dumb luck, a train roared its way into the background of our shot halfway through the take. We held the shot for as long as we could and when the train ed, all of us stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed at each other, and then- though we were dripping with sweat, exhausted from the 104°F temperature- jumped and shouted and danced for joy. It was the best shot in the movie, bar-none.

  Every time I watch and think about 'Hud', I think about that day.

• 21 Up

  Call me elitist, but Michael Apted's 'Up' series is the real 'Boyhood'. For obvious reasons (the closeness in age), I see a lot of myself in these folks. The same fears, the same frustrations, the same joys, the same twentysomething angst.

  I've spent more than a handful of sleepless nights wondering if I'll make it to the places I want to get to, and in some small way, it's comforting to know that they did too-- these people that I'll never meet, who live thousands of miles away, who'll never read these words.

  Bless you, Michael Apted. This is what cinema is for.

• American Graffiti

  There are only a couple of teenage films that I've really connected with, and I think that's because so many of them (including and especially you, John Hughes) just simply don't get what it means to be a teenager.

  Richard Linklater once said this, about inspiration for 'Dazed and Confused' : " I don’t [it] being that dramatic. It was really rare when [you had] star-crossed lovers from the opposite side of the tracks, and the girl gets pregnant and there’s a car crash and somebody dies. That didn’t really happen much. But riding around and trying to look for something to do with the music cranked up, now that happened a lot!"

  That, in a giant-size nutshell, is my memory of being seventeen. And 'American Graffiti' captures that in every way. It's a memory I've replayed far too many times, and will doubtless continue to for many more years to come.

• Kagemusha

  I started watching films outside the English language when I was sixteen, and in those early days of Bergman, Fellini, Herzog, and Malle, there were a lot of films I saw and respected, but didn't quite enjoy. That barrier of languages was still there, and continued to be there for several years.

  Until Kurosawa.

  Not enough people talk about 'Kagemusha' and I think that's kind of a shame. I've read that Kurosawa sometimes called it dress rehearsal for 'Ran', but that's just too much of a disservice- frankly I prefer this one. Long before Tony Zhou came along, I very clearly staying up far too late one summer night, gazing at the light and color streaming forth from my tiny eleven-inch television set, thinking over and over to myself, "every shot of this is a painting".

  And for one reason or another, that wall of... whatever you want to call it- discomfort, or disconnect- disappeared that night.

  And I'm so glad it did.

• Gravity

  'Gravity' was very likely the brightest spot in a rough-'n-tumble, draining, headache year of my life that included deaths in the family, crappy medical diagnoses, friendship breakdowns, and a July 4th night which likely ranks as the loneliest moment of my life so far.

  I dunno why, but 'Gravity' just hit me in the right spot. I spent the last ten minutes of it crying and I feel no shame in saying that.

• Black Orpheus

  I don't really have anything profound to say about this one other than the fact that it simply makes me happy.

  Everybody's always dancing, and the summer heat is sweltering but that's okay cause you can grab a cold one, turn up the bossa-nova, and watch a Rio sunset with your buds, until you that death-incarnate is trying to steal your new girlfriend and you should probably do something about it.

  This is my cup of tea.

• Monsieur Hulot's Holiday

  Step into any introductory film course and ask the mandatory-but-slightly-ridiculous, 'Who's your favorite filmmaker?' question, and you'll get a lot of undergrads shouting names like Tarantino, Scorsese, Nolan, Fincher, and if one of them's especially indie, then they'll say Kubrick.

  I think a lot of kids at this age are, for some reason, naturally drawn to the darker, grittier, colder, hard-R fare. How many dorm rooms do you think have been plastered with posters of 'Fight Club' and 'Pulp Fiction' and 'American Psycho' over the years?

  The older I get, and the more movies I watch, the more I think that we completely undervalue... well, joy. I use that word because 'comedy' is too broad and doesn't really capture what I mean. It may sound stupid, but it's true. We place so much importance on the grand, dramatic, tragic, dark, capital-letter Statements, and we enjoy but sweep aside the lighthearted romps.

  You've already guessed it, and you're right- that's just not me.

  'Monsieur Hulot's Holiday' is pleasant, through-and-through. It's merry and fun and simple and bouncy and just plain happy to exist. It's the kind of film I'm finding myself drawn to more and more every day.

• Foxcatcher

  This may sound like I'm slightly contradicting what I just said previously because boy, is this a dark cynical Statement-movie, but I don't think I've learned more about filmmaking from any other film in the last couple years than I have from 'Foxcatcher'.

  I'll just give one example:

  Early in the film, there's a scene where Channing Tatum's Mark and Mark Ruffalo's Dave train together. Not a word is said. All we see is the back-and-forth, attack-defense moves between two Olympian brothers.

  Dave dives for Mark's leg and throws him down. They get back up and start over. Mark tries the same move, but Dave pushes him off easily. They get back and start over. Mark tries again, but Dave throws him to the ground. They get back up and start over. Mark switches it up, juking around and then going for Dave's neck. They tussle like little kids for a second, and then Mark headbutts his brother, giving him a bloody nose. Dave steps off the map, waits a second, then wipes the blood onto his shirt, spits, and they start over.

  You see it all right there. All of Mark's rage. All of Dave's calm composure. Their entire relationship. It's all in the way they move and respond to each other- what they do, what they don't do. You don't need words, you don't need exposition or commentary or voiceover because it's all right there.

  These are the kinds of scenes I dream about making.

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.