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Incredible performances, but in service of something I can't quite isolate or articulate.

Probably the most I've laughed at the theater in a decade. Tim Robbins is a man-shaped funhouse mirror being held up to to a peculiarly American brand of male loneliness.

A couple of scenes so good they transcended everything around them, and a couple so bad I'm not sure how they made it into the final cut. Swings and roundabouts.

Love the idea of this type of movie being slow and character-driven, but that only works if the script doesn't frequently completely stink. Able and in particular McNairy (as the cartoonishly, immersion-ruiningly unlikeable Kaulder) are largely dreadful, which doesn't help.

Lot of fun stuff here though, all that aside. I kind of wish Gareth Edwards would just, like, try again? This could be great.

Think I'd enjoy this even more without the English dub. Stay tuned for a subbed rewatch

Pattinson and Ruffalo anchor things, but thematically and structurally I was left a little disappointed. The dinner scene is worth the price of ission, but overall feel like this got a bit fucked in the edit.

You know how it is

Better than Before Sunrise, but obviously owes it a great debt. One of the masterpieces of American cinema.

Yep still magic

Looks beautiful, sounds beautiful, beautifully acted, but missing the alchemy that elevates the best of this type of thing. Before Sunset is the obvious reference, and whether it's the dialogue or the chemistry, there is definitely something magic present there that is missing here.

The idea of doing card tricks, which are silly at their very core, really seriously and really really importantly, is wonderful. - Penn Jillette

Glazer and Kidman had to walk vanishingly narrow tightrope to carry the audience along with a premise so preposterous, but walk it they do. I have no clue how anyone was convinced to finance this, but what an utterly strange and affecting few hours of cinema.

Didn't really ring true, and with a movie like this that kind of kills the whole deal. I simply didn't find the cousins convincing as characters, which undermined any attempt to investigate their traumas both individual and shared.

Pretty cut-and-dry for Lynch. Dealing with the depravity of your crimes by reimagining yourself as the victim and your wife as an evil, sexual object deserving of her punishment. The Mystery Man as Fred's unconscious, leaving a trail of crystalline recorded truths that Fred cannot escape. Fred prefers the dreamworld he has conjured, but movies never lie.

Fun! Not as subversive as you want it to be, but kind of delicious.

Alchemically transmutes the traditionally psychosexual energy into the kind of death-drive Jean Rollins tapped into in La Rose de Fer. Much more unsettling and diabolical.

Star of the show is the languorous, malevolent camera.

Unusually mean-spirited. Irredeemable.

Shit actually

The least believable thing about this movie was Tom Hanks having Dave Chapelle as his wisecracking best friend and wing man. Like fuck mate.

A bit mean-spirited. Could just have easily been a cautionary tale about not knowing who you're really talking to online. Still, I miss silly little movies where noone has phones and kids still read books. Watching stuff set in NYC between 1985 and 2001 is kinda hauntalogical, nostalgic for a future that never quite came to .

Something missing. Maybe it's the script, maybe it's Tom Cruise overwhelming any movie he's in, maybe it's the general absurdity of the plot. Not my favourite Mann.

Why don't you listen? You're a part of me!
Have you ever thought that maybe you're a part of me?

Perfect Blue asks "What are we? Are we how the world perceives us, or how we perceive ourselves?"

To which Paprika replies "Or are we ineffable, beyond perception? A floating iceberg of consciousness only aware in the most tenuous way of the massive, looming self that lies just beneath the waterline of reality?"

The ideas are wonderful and the script has these moments of shining clarity and insight that I love, but Paprika does suffer in comparison to Perfect Blue in of lacking emotional footholds. Still a singular vision and definitely one for repeat viewing.

Reminded me of something I once read about hikikomori, that one root cause is a rejection of the idea that the 'real' is implicitly more significant than the 'imagined'.

So inventive and haunting. Ends on a note that can be interpreted as either ironic or hopeful, and I'm not sure I come down firmly on either side based on a single viewing.

A couple really funny moments but this was like 25 mins of material stretched out to a feature length. Tighten this up and it's an episode of Sunny or something

Really effective! Totally nailed the format. Scary!!

Not something that worked for me. Strange and surreal, but not funny enough to carry it off

Can't shake being a generic Hollywood action comedy even as it seems to want to subvert them

Hard film to rate. There's definitely something to the criticism that Ani's character lacked interiority - Why does she believe the things she believes? Why does she act the way she acts? - and I do feel that a few of the situations were so tightly choreographed that they undercut the mood of chaos that was being aimed for.

And yet, it's a magnetic watch. It's beautiful, lurid, well-acted, unusual. Just a shame we don't get any sort of window into the motives and desires of the titular character, which wouldn't have been an issue had her actions not seemed incongruous with even the thin sketch we are presented with. This needed 15 minutes of the nocturnal manhunt swapped for 15 minutes of Ani shooting the shit with her friends from HQ.

About that final scene - my initial thought was that this was Ani asserting dominance over someone who had earlier stripped her of agency. Almost an "I'm back in charge motherfucker". Then the breakdown, the exhaustion, the acknowledgement that the only way she can conceive of to assert herself is couched in her own commodification. I don't know. I like this interpretation better than her actions either being a reward for Igor returning her ring, or a progression of growing genuine affection. Not sure whether the text s it.

Nothing makes me miss England more than this slice of fried gold

Two stars for the craft, which is phenomenal, but zero stars for literally everything else.

Cronenberg(BoJack + Severance) = The Substance

Definitely has issues, but addressing a couple of frequent criticisms I've seen here:

"It doesn't ring true that Sue is the most famous woman in the world for hosting an aerobics show on TV" - The content of the show is irrelevant; that's the point. What's the functional difference between Pump It Up With Sue and Love Island? It's a metaphor pointing out the absurdity of how we disguise misogyny as content. Pump It Up being largely identical to the show it is praised for reinventing is the joke. Them both being ratings-busting aerobics shows, stripped of everything sans sex, is also the joke.

"Dennis Quaid's character seemed an outdated stereotype of a type of exec that has been phased out" - I know the character being named Harvey has certain connotations, but think about what we see Harvey do in visceral detail throughout the movie. Consume, waste, despoil, all in excruciating close-up. I don't think Harvey is simply a reference to exec culture not having changed as much as we'd like to think, I also think he is a stand in for us. For society's voracious appetites, our demands for things to always be newer and tighter, our obsession with numbers and our callous disregard for anyone not in vogue.

Again, unwatchable.

Unwatchable

Bad movie. Smorgasbord of clichés in search of a thesis.

Blew chunks, unfortunately.

The non-linear structure was so totally inconsequential that the sequencing may as well have been random. Just strange characters making inauthentic decisions in their unfathomable relationship. The balance of humor to pathos was all screwy too, resulting in the few genuinely funny moments feeling as though plucked from some other, better, movie.

Some movies can just about get away with bailing out on their premise, like Bigelow's Strange Days. Strange Days bails on an almost identical concept, but the movie is so lurid and electrifying that it remains unmissable. Rebel Ridge doesn't have nearly as much going on, so can't afford the luxury of such flimsy convictions.

The pitch seems to have been "let's have a black ex-marine non-lethally take down a bunch of white cops", and then the rest of the movie just kind of accreted around it without a lot of intent. A bit flat and aimless, and then ultimately a cop-out.

I nearly really liked this, but ended up just liking it. I'm in the camp that thinks that climactic scene was jarring and verged on trite. The middle third was really strong, as each of the three leads and their complicated dynamics began to unfurl.

Reminds me of some episodes of The X-Files that also straddle the line between being a nostalgic celebration of Americana while acknowledging the termites of degeneracy and amorality eating at the framework of American culture.

Perfectly serviceable if a bit long. Good transatlantic flight movie.

This was so much better than I thought it would be. Yummy juicy tension.

I love Twister, but it wasn't exactly revolutionary. It was a fun action movie with a good cast, in an era where we still knew how to do that without the algorithm fucking it all up. What it had going for it was leads with chemistry, visually iconic set pieces (e.g. The Shining at the drive-in), great ensemble acting, and enough memorable quotes to elevate it to cult classic ("We got cows!" "She did not marry your penis" "...Finger of God").

Twisters has none of the above. It's too inauthentic, too algorithmically on point. It's a Marvel movie for people who know their Reed Timmers from their Ryan Halls, all wink-wink references and a garbo plot outline straight out of ChatGPT. The lines you'll are ironic meta references, the set pieces you'll non-existent. Twister wasn't high art, but Twisters isn't art at all, it's just content.

Tornado CGI has improved, so that's cool.

Definitely a companion piece to Kurosawa's Cure. They are both obsessed with The Void, yet each holds up a contrasting lens. Where Memories of Murder satirises our attempts to understand and outmanoeuvre it, Cure puts it fully on display and compels the audience to peer right in. Memories shades it for me because I think the ideas are more fully-formed, or at least more clearly drawn.

I loved the feel of this so much but I have a hard to figuring out a coherent thesis. Strange and disquieting, absolutely.

Mamiya is a cypher for... what exactly? Violence roils just under the surface of society, and exists within each of us - and? Does hypnosis play a real role here metatextually or is it thematically irrelevant?

I'm definitely going to rewatch to see if I can't tease out some answers, but if anyone wants to prod me in some interesting directions I would love that.

It's the details that get you. Those fuckin' jelly shoes, man.

The book really deserves a better movie. Like everyone else has said, the voiceover just kills this stone dead. What a bizarre way to approach telling such a rich and interesting story.

Letterboxd is a mixed bag but the reviews for Taxi Driver are particularly horrendous. Media literacy is so fucked

It's just so hard to get past the dialogue. As others have said, there is a much better movie in there somewhere.

I love how physical it is, how obsessed with muscles and skin and sweat and hair. De Niro's body is Scorsese's canvas, and he beats it and strokes it and engorges it, all via dripping closeups and crackling flashbulbs.

For Jake and for us watching Jake, his lived experience is inseparable from the meat his mind animates, and we morbidly observe every facet of his inner life explode across the bodies of him and those around him.

Pretty close to movie alchemy.

Will never lose the power to unsettle. Has there ever been an atmosphere more thick with grief and dread?

Filled me with total, childlike delight. What a beautiful ending too, Hulot's hidden gift of flowers whose shape so closely mirrors the street lamps, gently imploring the young to recall the old even as it is consumed by the new.

Good grief what a movie. Some of the sequences here are all-timers, just the most gorgeous, beguiling filmmaking. During the finale you feel De Palma starting to lose you with that ludicrous parade, but then he pulls that slowly spinning firework shot out of his ass and you forgive him for everything. Now that's a scream

Still stylish as all hell, but leaves you cold.

horror to watch soon

• Honeymoon
• We Are What We Are
• The Stone Tape
• Witch
• Black Mountain Side
• Buzzard
• Vampyr
• Goodnight Mommy
• Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
• When Animals Dream

...plus 33 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.