4v291o

my criteria for this is: would the people this is skewering be happy with it? and i think they’d be delighted — it feels like armstrong was so focused on stuffing this with witty quips that he forgot none of those guys are smart enough to understand even half the references he’s making. i suppose that’s perfectly fine, he’s not making a documentary here, but i wanted some catharsis out of the satire and i didn’t really get any. at least ‘don’t look up’ gave me that!

GOATed as per

i love my Nan too

very wry sideways look at history (and, dare i say it, the present). “the university prefers silence”, alana haim’s fade-into-the-background performance as a working mother, the most complimentary instance of mistaken identity possible — cannes saved one of its best for last. au revoir 2025

10:30pm or 8:30am — cannes offered perhaps the most thematically appropriate screening times of the festival to this film, a dreamy number i can offer no value judgement on whatsoever because, appropriately, i was fighting sleep for the entirety. tfw you’re a being of light who understands the forgotten language of cinematography but you’re too sleepy!

God bless to all involved but this felt like one of those mobile game adverts where 12 thousand things happen. and none of them the things that should have!

i think this has interesting things to say about (re)creating magic: it can never be done by being precious about things, and the kind of poetry that you think exists in life never does, so don’t even try to tempt it. i also appreciate that it’s open-hearted to all its characters, even the bastards, and it’s definitely the best of the two northern european films at cannes this year about old houses and the women who’ve lived in them. unfortunately, unlike nearly everyone i’ve spoken to, i felt close to no emotion whatsoever while watching this. it will probably win the palme d’or.

an opportunity for revenge lands at your front door, and all the hurt in you tries to convince you you’re capable of doing what was done to you right back — but then you discover that, actually, your humanity prevents it. there are lines you just can’t cross, no matter what; your anger finds a point of failure where theirs never could.

this is simultaneously very panahi and also not at all — it’s deeply clever and has wonderful mastery of tone (sliding between absurdism & anguish as panahi pleases), but by the last shot it’s straight terror, a final submission from the man who has famously overcome every obstacle put in his way that, yes, evil exists. where do we go next?

did something i’ve never done in my life today: left a movie before it finished. not because it was bad — i was actually interested up to that point (johansson doesn’t always get the timing right, and some of the beats are trite, but i was fascinated by the kind of random ass drama that apparently fascinates this A-lister) — i just had to make another screening. if anyone can tell me how it plays after the ruse is rumbled i’d be grateful

this chisels away the tension of kurosawa’s paralysing moral dilemma to make room for spike & denzel to go kind of old head mode, but it’s such a busyyyyy film they never get bogged down anyway. spike toggles between the drama at hand, “i love NY”, “i hate the red sox”, “a24 made this movie”, and “i really really love the knicks” faster than i think i’ve ever seen a director switch up the tone — and it WORKS!! enjoyed the ‘he got game’ approach to music (copland-esque stuff simmering under nearly every scene) but could have been sharper on the visuals, with little in that regard to make you perk up in your seat (did like the film inserts though). ultimately, what matters here is that a lot of ‘highest 2 lowest’ reminded me of the final few minutes of ‘25th hour’ — so it’s pretty good.

i wish anderson would skip the boy scout tomfoolery and lean more into the transcendence of love stuff (a la asteroid city) that he eventually arrives at here, but i’m patient enough to respect the balance of the one-for-them-one-for-me formula. to the cedars of lebanon 🌲❤️🤍💚

a gorgeous sense memory that gave me my much-needed first real jolt of emotion this cannes. the moment when the boys reach for each others hands, each one realising in the chaos of post-june 12 lagos that the other isn’t just an annoying rival for the best toys and ice cream and affection but someone to sustain and be sustained by for the rest of their time on earth, until they’re their father’s age and beyond — just a beautiful evocation of what it’s like to discover what love & family mean as a kid. fantastic debut

definitely in petzold’s usual wheelhouse but unexpectedly something i think i could have seen from another director, though it was improved by the q&a after the screening, during which petzold revealed himself as a pretty good raconteur & offered a theory for the increasing simplicity & modernness of his films. also revealed: that the film originally had a different, more “harmonious’ ending, but that this was scrapped because paula beer didn’t think it was right & petzold came to see it as selfish given the current moment of turmoil (name-checking the ukraine-russia war, trump’s election, and… nothing else!)

far from the juvenile time-waste that ‘beau is afraid’ was but also not the movie it thinks it is (if it even knows what it is, i’m not convinced — cynical & satirical & quite sincere but also exploitationy & conspiracy-minded itself). will have to think more on it but i do appreciate how much it really, really goes for capturing an era that no one else even wants to touch yet. very aster thing to do

reviewed in full for The AV Club

not sure that what it’s trying to do with islam works (a speaker ≠ the kaaba lol) but the visceral stuff is great & i loved feeling mad maxy again, even if i still have to process everything past the first swerve into plot. did enjoy that laxe turned up at the premiere fully leaning into his rasputin resemblance too

so this guy has just always been into role-reversing freudian theory then

not a bad movie but definitely not a farah one. i don’t doubt schilinski’s sincerity — there were thoughts spoken aloud in this that i’ve never heard outside of my own head — but it triggered all my skepticism about the overuse of motifs and relentless wallowing in cruelty being used to gesture at something deeper than the material actually offers. ‘sound of falling’ is by no means shallow, but 2.5 hours of thinking “so that man should die!” and being given one tiny moment of (kind of misplaced) transcendence in the last shot to comfort myself with… i’m just not sure that “formally daring riff on haneke” can offer more than the sum of its parts, intriguing though they sound on paper. happy to have seen it in the best conditions possible though: with 2300+ other people in the lumiere, its newly installed dolby atmos sound system working in tandem with the deep inhales of my dozing neighbour to immerse me in the film’s woozy atmosphere as fully as i ever could be.

was surprised by how unsurprising this was — either loznitsa expects us to be just as naive as the young prosecutor (impossible given all our historical hindsight), or he thinks there’s value in us simply witnessing that naivety. if the latter, i can’t say i got too much out of that process or the austere frame we view it from — and for something based on a novella, there was a strange lack of character to it, it neither feeling intense or weird the way short stories usually do (everything that happened being fairly obvious & telegraphed) or anticlimactic in the subversive ironic way they sometimes are. i don’t know, but it feels like either me or the film is missing something!

unfortunately didn’t work for me — i couldn’t get on its wavelength, the film never quite settling into a consistent rhythm for me because quimet always seemed about to inflame things into un-simòn-esque drama. still, a moving final scene and some very adorable kids & affecting grandparents — and it’s not like i would ever give up on the director who made one of the finest films of the 2010s.

last half-hour aside, this wasn’t a bad movie but a feels-bad one — so much so that i had to watch it in like 4 goes. in contrast to some of my friends i think there’s talent in making something viscerally upsetting (even annoying) to the extent the first 2 hours are, and i even found some of it funny to my own surprise. insanely eclectic ing cast, and phoenix is really good at playing the you from your nightmares, the one who can’t scream or run no matter how much you try, to the point that i think it will take a while for me to stop seeing him with that sweaty veneer of patheticness he wears here. 

and then the last half-hour or so happens, and all the facile oedipal stuff that i was prepared to forgive boils over into freud’s lamest ideas. i started wondering whether this was aster’s ploy, if he’d convinced himself that pissing everyone off is an achievement a la solondz or something — and then i decided that idc either way. God bless

last shot كتير حلو

characteristically brutal but with more moments of respite than i can feeling in a ramsay film, final shot aside (which over-egged it a little for me). gold star to the criterion subtitler who i’m sure tried their best!

wish i had been able to appreciate the nuances while watching, but alas it’s only the press notes, read afterwards, that revealed the film’s richness to me — shahrzad’s symbolic absence in the film, and the story of her life post-stardom (as of earlier this year, it was reported she was living in a shelter) really smarts. a very moving tribute by panahi, one i respect all the more for not spelling things out for those like me who don’t immediately appreciate what it’s doing

i’ve always been a little freaked out by samantha morton, but the little i’ve seen of her couldn’t really for why, so i didn’t understand it — until i saw this, and realised that some part of me must have been able to sense this performance, as if she communicates its latent energy in everything she does. happy to have solved the mystery, but i can’t say i’m any less freaked out by her now

thousand-and-oneth viewing, only the second time ever on the big screen. there are movies that i love and then there are movies i can feel love me back, and this is one of them — no other film i’ve seen (yet) can bring the experience of love into almost corporeal reality for me. it all floods back when i watch this: the furtive glances and the almost painfully acute awareness of the other person’s presence, the desperation to be in the same room as them (“I came to Rosings with the single object of seeing you... I had to see you”) and the feeling of being physically transformed by their cherished touch (the hand flex). joe wright is such a lover, and everyone involved in this film channels that spirit so intuitively that this movie doesn’t just evoke memories — when i watch it, i feel the future, the presence of the transcendence i’ve been looking for as if it’s already here. a truly, truly beautiful movie in every respect, one i can turn to and never doubt that it will return me to myself if i really need it. bell. iss. ima.

must be my thousandth watch but i still felt the blood rush into my nose the way it does when i’m about to cry at two new points: the first, when lizzy is trying to tell her sister that she loves darcy and she blurts out “jane…” before being interrupted; the second, when her face & darcy’s are silhouetted against the sunrise at the very end, which struck me for the first time as huge & elemental, like i could see the love itself — man’s face, woman’s face, furiously burning star, is there anything else in the world. that’s the magic of the big screen baby — happy 20th to one of the greatest movies ever made

liked this one less than the others for a lot of the time, except of course for the lively council meetings and that one politician who looks like evil paul simon. and then the last 10 minutes happened, and i found myself smiling in sheer wonder — not at the helicopter shots surprisingly enough, but at the confluence of the images taken from underneath the sheets (the sky all turned pink) and of the locals who gathered on the bridge and the shoreline to see something magical made of their home.

i think it’s in this film that christo says something to the effect of his & jeanne claude’s art not being about the piece itself but everything that happens in response to it — i suppose that’s basically true of all art but their conscious centring of that has really moved me as i’ve made my way thru these films. beautiful piano music at the end too, which made every new image erupt into epiphany in my brain and turned my bitterness at losing the world of the film into gratitude for everything that’s lingered: a tree’s waving shadow, a man and a woman embracing, a hawk touching down on the nest it’s made to welcome new life into the world.

blocking heaven, procedural heaven, moral thriller heaven — while watching this i was hit w immense gratitude that movies exist

were you skeptical the way most people were at first?

— no, i can’t see any reason in being skeptical over it. they built the golden gate bridge. it’s not the erection of it… this is a vision, boy. 

after seeing ‘running fence’ last week, i was drawn to put this on to discover more of christo & jeanne-claude’s work, but after my second one now, i think it’s the way the maysleses & giffard capture the pride of the communities in which these pieces are staged, and the pride of the communities created in the process of building them, that’s really pulling me in. case in point: when you’re breathlessly marvelling at the curtain finally being unfurled, and then the filmmakers show you shot after shot of people embracing each other — labourers jumping into each other’s arms, a man asking jeanne-claude if he can kiss her, one of the high wire guys strolling blissfully towards the camera, hand in hand with a woman — and you realise there was more of your breath to take away. bellissima

sweetly ironic that a movie about ephemeral beauty could be so timelessly moving. the locals’ reactions to the piece, especially the open hearts of the elderly people interviewed, churned something up in me, made me how tender the world can be. and no wonder: all the cynicism in the world has got to melt away when faced with the image of the curtain disappearing into the sea. killer orchestration on that final shot too, and i love the ive cowboy. wonder-ful film

brazil mentioned

my best friend wanted to go see this because we rewatched the first 2 movies approximately 10 thousand times in high school so i begrudgingly agreed, fully expecting it to be ass — i’d read the book so i knew what was coming, and i just didn’t think they’d have the juice to get the tone right. how wrong i was: i laughed, i cried (for the first time in years in a cinema!), i maladaptive daydreamed… add to that the full circle moment of it all, that my friend and i used to watch these movies at 14, yearning to be in our thirties, and now we’re watching this one at 31… a total triumph on every count for me. 🥲

when the b&w shot of the maqlouba bursts into joyous colour, and then melts into nightmarish negative… cinema, miraculous cinema. full review here (fee donated)

crazy romantic — the poems, the scene in the hotdog shop, sam’s courtship:

“it fits!”
“like i was in the store with you”
“you were.”

lovely stuff.

any movie that chooses to tell this story is bound to be beautiful — and i think i appreciate that choice more this time than on original watch, because everything haynes celebrates here has since been treated with so much scorn from the losers of the world. the radicalism in ruffalo’s later speeches and the real-life cameos at the end were where that beauty really hit me in the chest — deeply moving moments that put tears in my eyes and really speak to the irable sincerity & clear eyes underlying haynes’s approach here.

i do think those last scenes inadvertently highlight some of the undermining artificiality of the rest of the movie though — some casting choices/performances pulled me out (hathaway especially, but bill camp also felt a little too much like an actor to me — i know, i’m sorry). it might sound strange, complaining about artificiality in a haynes film, but he was obviously not going for his usual approach here, and i don’t think he quite had the mastery of tone we can usually expect from him. i appreciate this isn’t his usual , but i’d have loved for him to have gone all the way to the other end — for the film to have felt a little less hollywood and a little more parkersburg, and to have experienced more of the lump-in-throat swell of those last images earlier on.

these are criticisms i feel a little ashamed to make, given the times we live in — like i said, i shouldn’t take it for granted that movies like this will always get made, and indeed that haynes’s films will either (joaquin phoenix, i have not forgotten you). if there’s one other choice i can shout out as penance, it’s the cut from someone staring in horror at their arsoned home to robert pulling into a parking garage that’s shot and colour graded like the deep throat scene from ‘all the president’s men’, and then the ‘michael clayton’ moment afterwards — very nice.

this has been a long awaited watch, but i think i’ll need another one, because i’m finding myself out of step with so many people i usually agree with in quite a fundamental way. my problem is less that i disagree with much of the praise that people have given the movie (i’ll give some of my own in a minute, dw) but that i can’t see the film as a unified thing like so many can. it just doesn’t really add up to a whole for me — the individual parts, as great as some might be, come away too easily from each other.

there’s plenty that is seriously breathtaking: the revelation in the opening scene, the revelation in the closing scene, the carrara sequence (so unbelievably beautiful; it felt like rohrwacher which isn’t a comparison i think i’ve ever felt moved to give to another 21st century movie). the costuming is also out of this world (i’m thinking of that slobby ass suit harry always wears, and the insane fits that laszlo, gordon, and orazio get off in the second half), and the production design is maybe one of two elements that feel consistently alive throughout the film. (the other is white american lowercase-b brutalism, which is fascinatingly presented as another tee-up for zionism.)

but that’s it — otherwise, it often played like a frankenstein job to me. in places it felt like corbet had embellished rather than integrated (top of my mind here is the labed/cassidy thing, which doesn’t seem to be a thought from the same brain that made the preceding 3+ hours).
there’s a fair amount that, like this moment, feels disconnected from the rest, or that undermines what the movie has going for it on of simply being not good. the writing is one thing that gets in the way — i get the feeling that corbet and fastvold were too enamoured with certain turns of phrase (a fatal condition if you’re editing your own work), which fucks up the flow and dampens the intended effect for anyone not in their bubble. they’re also not altogether successful in trying to stuff so much plot in — it’s as if they’ve tried to adapt every page of a novel to film without grasping that the two modes can never translate directly (e.g. books allow for isolated little asides, but movies need to everything). and i hate to say it, because i loved the novelty of it, but the intermission doesn’t help at all; it lets the air go out of the movie when it might’ve been kinder to itself (if not our bladders) to force us through the 3+ hours.

and yet, and yet — there’s something deeper that’s pushing me to rewatch. corbet’s self-seriousness might not be entirely earned, but at the end of the day this is the mf who revived vistavision, who brought together the people who made some of the most towering images and craft i’ve seen in maybe this century and did it all for TEN MILLION DOLLARS. if i’m gonna give anyone another 3.5 hours of my
life, it’s that guy

i had a strange time with this one — i put it on because i was in the mood to look at tom cruise or matthew mcconaughey and this sounded like it had extra potential beyond that draw, but i was disappointed with the first 45 minutes. the structure and pace felt unintuitive (it makes puerto rico feel like a big deal and then just… leaves) and tom skerritt’s character struck me as entirely right in these scenes, when we’re actually supposed to hate him — i felt the film was misjudging how much goofy stuff the audience was prepared to accept from arroway in the beginning (which is saying something, because jodie foster could normally convince us of anything).

i ended up turning the film off for the night, but i came back to it today, drawn in again not by mcconnaughey but weirdly by that electromagnetic throbbing sound, the strangely moving mechanical heartbeat that soundtracks the first discovery scene. the film gets better from there — foster’s performance in the machine and… wherever she goes… is genuinely breathtaking — though it still never fully lifts off, hamstrung by its insistence on making really facile points in the middle of actually compelling ones (not to mention the technical wizardry going on here — that bathroom mirror shot, bruh). obviously there is also the ‘interstellar’ connection; i realise now (after probably half of letterboxd has) that this laid a lot of the groundwork for nolan’s movie, so i have to hand it to ‘’, there are some really commendable forays into outré territory here. still can’t say i loved it, though there are elements that i think really will stay with me — ok to go, they should’ve sent a poet, DUM DUM DUM. 

“you couldn't see, could you? that night, crossing the street. you crossed anyway.”

fractured in places but so transcendent in others that it doesn’t matter. there are shots in here that feel like straight malick, and many more that feel like what ‘dune’ was reaching for. incredible atmosphere — steely and throbbing all at once. i got a kick out of the proto-‘talented mr ripley’ dynamic of law’s presence but it’s really all about hawke, who can be so ugly when vincent is conniving and so irresistible when he’s sincere — and all with the same face. michael nyman went so crazy here that the score is still ringing in my head, as is:

“i never saved anything for the swim back.”

not to mention that final image of planetary shadows shifting across ethan hawke’s perfect — you guessed it — face. can’t believe this is a debut!

so much darker than i expected, what the hell — at the point john meets crow, this started to feel a little fincher to me, and that impression only deepened the more the truth was revealed. cruise goes absolutely CRAZY, farrell is off-the-charts smarmy (and yet still irresistible…), but i actually wish samantha morton had taken it down a notch because she tipped this into way-too-haunting for a weeknight watch for me. not to mention the score, which sounds like the ghost of ‘50s cinema is possessing the film… don’t worry farah none of this is real🙏

sorta lost me when it leaned too much into kaufman territory, and i’m not sure reinsve totally pulls off her role, but still really good. funny that edward’s personality transformation into guy is basically entirely telegraphed by the reveal that he works as a realtor, and even funnier that, in order to make it obvious just how much more confident oswald is than edward, pearson pounces on his lines 0.001 seconds after his scene partners speak — as if oswald is so assured he already knows what they’ll say next. touché

feels like breillat saw ‘birth’ and said “bet.” this is really good — kircher’s performance is a standout, but i’m also thinking specifically of the moment when théo tells sandra that tattoos hurt, but that she’ll love it, and her resistance melts; you can sense here that it’s the pain that’s the draw for her, not the reassurance he gives her. or the opening scene, when sandra appears to be interrogating her young client and then you intuit that she’s just playing the steely lawyer, ruthless maybe but always in pursuit of justice — until the end, when you realise that maybe there really was a darker part of herself at play there, masking itself as something else. 

i really can’t help but compare this to ‘birth’ because i rewatched glazer’s movie recently, a memory that illuminated something here and made this the weaker film for me. when ‘birth’ pops its psychodrama bubble with a plot pinprick, it doesn’t get away from everything it was before — but i think ‘last summer’ does, rushing through too much plot in its eagerness to set up that (ittedly killer) final shot. that means certain moments don’t zing like they should; the full freakiness of sandra’s reconciliation with her sister, for example, doesn’t hit like i think it wanted to. still, this is a great & rare 21st century entry into a special category of films — the kind i stutter over when someone asks, “so what’s it about?”

“if i was a woman, i’d cry when i heard it.” some crazy good scenes in here — everything in the cinema, the lover boy moment in the phone booth, the loubia on the bus (lol), the jeweller — all culminating in the fumble of the century 🤦‍♀️ bro really bottled it smh. occurred to me while watching that my dad would have been around omar’s age when this was released — will have to watch it with him some time for that precious baba commentary.

“you’ve said enough. you’ve made the stones seem alive before my eyes.” a righteous earthquake strikes a young man when he realises his life has been built on desecrating history — this is so like ‘la chimera’ that i have to assume alice rohrwacher drew inspiration from it (the scene where the mummy’s bandages are sliced open made me recoil just as viscerally as the tombaroli’s decapitation of the statue did). amazing stuff, possibly improved only by some bitter hint or reference as to what was coming (the british and their shovels).

just as amazing for me: being able to understand a lot of the arabic, because it’s spoken shakespearean style (also shakespearean: that weasel murad). would make a perfect double feature with rohrwacher’s film, and a great watch to accompany my friend noah’s brilliant book on what the plundered objects themselves might say about it all.

incredible scope and life in such a small package — and extra incredible because it freely its so many of the facts of life that the arab society i grew up in worked so hard to deny. didn’t think it was possible for a shot to rival the steam scene from ‘brief encounter’ but the image of the tracks groaning and lifting and groaning and lifting under the weight of the rumbling train — a rhythm echoed metres away by abu sree3 and hannuma in that warehouse — might just do it. كتير حلو

it’s been snowing this week and so the sand in my veins naturally started scratching — it was either book a flight or watch a western, so i picked this one, attracted rather than put off by its length. and what a picture, literally: so good to watch a movie that traffics so much and so unabashedly in images and the act of switching between them, even if that does mean the dubbing got short shrift. not sure i ever really bought fonda’s defection to the dark side (it’s the voice: too soft, like bob ross trying to play scary) but it barely mattered in the end, especially given my attentions were swaying in the direction of bronson’s strong & silent presence — the kind that’s hard to pull off anymore without an actor seeming self-aware and spoiling the whole effect.

the arabic was simply too wrong and weird (incorrect pronunciations, stilted non-native delivery) for me to get past, sorry. always had a lot of fondness for villeneuve’s films but it’s not escaping me that he paid about as much real thought to the peoples referenced in ‘dune’ as he did here… a whole 11 years and 25x the budget later

probably about as good as these movies are going to get for me — a very arresting vision of gotham is painted here but no amount of travis bickle rain or smudged eyeliner can make up for the naivety seemingly inherent in all superhero stories, and i was disappointed by the attempts to force those two facets together rather than get blasphemous with the formula a little. it did succeed at stringing me along to expect otherwise for a while, though, and it was nice to play “spot liverpool” too!

Watched on Saturday January 4, 2025.

Watched on Friday January 3, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday December 31, 2024.

• Make Way for Tomorrow

  "Will you please stop borrowing trouble?"

• Colette

  Colette describing being in the Resistance: “[We were] playing with fire. Or rather, fire was playing with us...”

• The Big Sleep

  the shot of the door being peppered with bullets near the end

a running list of films i want to are perfect

• Atonement
• Certified Copy
• The King of Comedy
• The Lobster
• Lovers Rock
• Mikey and Nicky
• Moonlight
• Pride & Prejudice
• Taxi Driver
• A Woman Under the Influence

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Richard III
• Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
• The Company of Strangers
• Smoke
• Norma Rae
• The Kiosk
• The Long Good Friday
• Bringing Out the Dead
• The Dead
• Faya Dayi

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

not movies about quantum physics!

movies that remind me just how alive the past once was

• First Cow
• Gangs of New York
• The New World

a running list of (good) movies that are either: A) set in the past but made in a dramatically ahistorical style — e.g. anti-period dramas like 'the favourite' or B) set in the present day but made in a style associated w/ earlier cinema — e.g. 'le havre'

• Transit
• Le Havre
• The Favourite
• Gallipoli

• Elsa the Rose
• The Red Balloon
• Indiscreet
• Acasă, My Home
• Surfarara
• Sea Countrymen

1. Lovers Rock
2. Nomadland
3. One Night in Miami...
4. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
5. Time
6. Siberia
7. Undine
8. Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)
9. Mangrove
10. Ammonite