4v291o

bresson in colour; half strung streets ringing out with people, empty to the world, the feverish intensity of dreams finding itself out of place in the world, rippling surfaces of sensualism; incomplete lines of fantasies webbed into each other...

beautifully framed, a film spinning around an essence rather than character, plot or idea, dreadfully slow in most places - essential single mother-only child summer viewing experience

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

magnificent, bleak audioscape called forth by a colour, punctuated by it, drenched by it-both open, azure blue, and inescapable claustrophobia of death and dissipation, moving as few things can ever be. a poetry of clear, associational images opening into great distances, silences. oh blue! ascend

Watched on Tuesday April 29, 2025.

how stepping out on your period feels like

Watched on Tuesday April 22, 2025.

to capture image without capturing it through a lens, to make the world work onto the film of its own accord; the breaking of the firmament, a vertigo of unexaminable depth, motion that dislocates.

Watched on Friday April 18, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 18, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

tender coming of age that seems to immerse itself in the humiliation, isolation, loyalties and sacrifices of childhood, staying true to the hazy memories of blundering through first times. learning to love your mom really is all that.

letterboxd projectors and ismail matchees

Watched on Friday April 11, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 7, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 1, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 1, 2025.

Watched on Monday March 31, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

stunning, undercurrents of a sinister, violent social force that only makes itself felt in the climax. some really good cinematography and sound design

the thrill of witnessing a completely new, intense visual language, floored within the first few minutes. sensual, dystopian, angry, slithering beautifully from snippets of reality, context and a sense of place to stark metaphor and folk horror. adèle ado is unbelievably stunning wtf.

strong, stark debut film with a heart rending quietude. the post colonial city furthering its own segregations.

um what the hell, sure

unsubtle trump era lebensraum satire with the consolations of electoral democracy. catholic guilt mickey 17 you'll always be ed.

Watched on Friday March 14, 2025.

folklore contorting into a sci-fi dystopia unfolding in a claustrophobic, brakish water tank. some really great details that repeat themselves over in images engaged in a play of mirrors, bodies, human or not, created, copied, mutilated and thrown into an atomised eastern bloc society run by a steady concentration of symbolic types.

Watched on Sunday March 9, 2025.

just terrible filmmaking, uninterested, uninteresting.

Watched on Sunday March 2, 2025.

documentation of a ransacking of art, an emptying out of artefacts, to be inventoried and covered in plastic in the basement of the colonizer's museums. an inquiry into this practice of imperial ethnography, politics of what is displayed and what is kept hidden, and when.

shoutout to the autumn sonata rehearsal, really interesting things happening with the plot.

Watched on Thursday February 27, 2025.

interesting visuals, trad, reactionary, a whirlpool of dream images

GAY

Watched on Sunday February 23, 2025.

bach's matthäusion, mercy, will those be forgiven who dare to sacrifice for an ambiguous ideal? disembodied voices, private and not of time. as estranged mourners gather around each other uncomfortably, the space of his houses, buildings remains translucent. tarkovsky waited almost 10 years for his country house at myasnoye to be bought, finished, made liveable, later in exile in italy and sweden too, the space of a home eluded him forever, perhaps this is the reason for his filming houses so. a pure piece of art, filled to the brim with his devotion to art, perhaps it is fate that i finished reading the last page of his diaries on the same day as i finished watching his last film.

glorious, glamorous physicality even in the restrictions of space. a world of persecution brimming with suavity, dignity and snazz. its not what its like in the world: this is genet's world of celebration, drag, and sublimation. relentless alternatives and ephemeral utopias.

Watched on Friday February 21, 2025.

literally the moby dick of cinema, a classic, they say its good, and it is all that, beyond that filled with a potency of images, some of them truly for the ages

Watched on Tuesday February 18, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday February 18, 2025.

Watched on Monday February 17, 2025.

it is the realisation that fragments bear more beauty than the whole, surrealism gateways into a world at the peripheries of escaping logic, not even dream logic, the heron comes from a point of light, turning beautiful and ugly, as dreams do. and if we give equal weightage to fantasy, does it not become a world of its own, indeed it exists, predates us. the dream and the dream maker. the かぐや姫 treatment of the wispy, escaping body. böcklin's 1880 isle of the dead, kafkas death ships that have no harbour. there must be guardians in the place of no time. it has all the joy, wonder and sadness of miyazakis worlds brought into the legend of the philosophers stone, a psycho-architectural dream narrative that is difficult to place, or bifurcate, indeed most of miyazakis characters dream, live, and are enlightened within this fantasy-scape. with perfection there is no injury, but no completion, so many worlds must be foregone that one life can be completely lived. forgetting too, is an understanding that happens beyond time.

This review may contain spoilers.

mort and la petite mort, the white sheets in the dryer and the snow, handel's rinaldo, 'let me weep' almirena pleads to her abductor. it is interesting in the beginning that gainsboroughs character does not find sex repulsive(given that it is the overwhelming of the maternal which is hardly present in the film, over the erotic) but calming - there is clearly no guilt around the activity itself, it becomes the apex point not only of loss but of losing control, descent into an animalism. the warped, pulsating wilderness(think the menace of edvard munch's 'towards the forest', 'eye in eye') the scene w the deer, eagle, fox, a violent wilderness with its lawless entropic sadism; clear symbolism and often simple allegory( nothing against it) there is a documentation of an unnatural witnesshood, one thinks of hölderlin's 'Alles sei Rhythmus’, and 'And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry/of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can/we make use of? Not Angels: not men,/and the resourceful creatures see clear/that we are not really at home/in the interpreted world.' the same, beauty is only terror. i think von trier is trying to work with the deepest dread of too much of with what we try so hard to forget, and the fear of dissolution existing in these lives lived at the brink of, and then smack in the middle of a literal and allegorical wilderness that overpowers reason and resistance. the failure of pygmalion. sex and death, deeply pessimistic and truly beautiful in some parts.

Watched on Saturday February 8, 2025.

the train transformative to reality, image, motion; beautiful light and shadow, opaque angles that open dark across the sky, the world of the coach, the silence.

Watched on Friday January 31, 2025.

Watched on Thursday January 23, 2025.

impossibly good

Watched on Friday January 10, 2025.