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One of the great masterpieces of the 2000s, and one of the great performances of all-time. Somehow, sadly, even more relevant today. RIP Val.

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

Watched on Thursday March 27, 2025.

Not entirely sure what I just watched but that makes it all the more intriguing. Gonna give this another go soon. The ending is especially confounding and mesmerizing.

Maybe the first baseball film that is entirely about wisdom. Will we ever learn? Probably not.

The dude loves canoe chases. The dude loves wild animals hissing. The dude loves sniper muskets. The dude loves dudes. The dude loves the ladies. The dude loves the forest. The dude loves sprinting. The dude loves cinema.

Whenever I watch this it is the greatest film ever made.

I teach KILLER OF SHEEP every semester, sometimes twice. Film History. Film as Art. It doesn't matter. I think it's the most socially consequential American film of the last 50 years. The ultimate compliment would be to say that RaMell Ross' NICKEL BOYS comes close to capturing the urgency and intimacy of Charles Burnett's masterpiece. This is something entirely unique here, a daring and scathing critique of historical perspective that thrives off the lifeblood of Marker and Micheaux in equal parts. It is the ultimate country symphony, because the city was never available.

Mike Leigh has been grappling with the effects of simmering anger for his entire career. How that anger impacts others. How that anger festers over time. How that anger explodes when there's no other way to release it. HARD TRUTHS focuses on a woman named Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) who has seemingly spent the last few decades experiencing all three of those facets of anger in a revolving cycle. There is no beginning to it, nor does there appear to be any end as well. Just mornings where she wakes up screaming, and the lonely nights we aren't even privy to see. The days in between are chalk full of petty slights, negative encounters, and and overall feeling of rage felt toward the world and her stunted family.

It's impossible to say if HARD TRUTHS is Mike Leigh's greatest achievement (it's Top 5 for me), but I am comfortable saying it is his most bracingly honest look at the generational power of anger. Some of the scenes are so harrowingly real I found myself fearing for my own future, taking a moment to contemplate my own trajectory and how I treat my own children. In this insane day and age, it's hard not to see yourself in its depiction of a complicated, thorny life that has succumbed to self-pity, fear, and doubt. There's no greater purgatory in this world, and it scared the shit out of me.

Technically impressive and often exhilarating, but for me, completely devoid of any cinematic soul. Suffocating, calculated showboating.

Anna Kendrick, director. A great debut.

How? Why? How?

Watched on Sunday February 9, 2025.

Watched on Monday February 10, 2025.

Mid-budget bangers like this just don't exist anymore. While brutal, this is one of the few revisionist Westerns that seeks to reconcile the legacy of brutality from both the white and Indigenous perspectives. Secretly one of Bale's finest performances, and the last shot is perfection.

A strangely paced and mysteriously ponderous sequel to one of my favorite genre films of the last 10 years. Really gets going around the 45 min mark and is pretty wonderful from there on out, but still, super weird.

Watched on Thursday January 30, 2025.

While Zoe Saldaña proves yet again why she's one of the most vital actors working today, unfortunately, Jacques Audiard proves yet again why he's one of the most lifeless directors working today. I kept waiting for this to get good and it just decided to keep being dull.

If you've seen (and appreciated) David Cronenberg's films or David Lynch's films or hell, even a Jennifer Lynch film, how can you think this is in any way novel or exciting or good? Despite Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley being stellar for 2/3 of the runtime, this thing is a taxing, tedious, and deathly obvious slog.

Very good, if not the great masterpiece most would claim it to be. Kind of at its worst when trying to be UNCUT GEMS LITE in the middle section, but by the end it had me. The final scene is one for the ages. In a film of so much yelling and threatening and posturing, it's the unspoken look of vulnerability that brings upon a flood of emotional release.

Watched on Sunday December 8, 2024.

The best film I've seen this year. Turn the screws, Clint. Precise, never a wasted moment. What a way to go out swinging in a film about going out swinging.

Makes for a fascinating double bill with RICHARD JEWELL. Both films are dealing with culpability, guilt, and the convenience of responsibility.

Watched on Friday November 22, 2024.

The first time in a long time that I haven't loved a new Hong. Still, it's very good, mysterious, unnerving at times, even otherworldly. But I never felt connected to this one like I have with so many of his previous films. Like Huppert's character, the film kind of sits there, experimenting with things lazily, hoping some method to life's madness will reveal itself.

Watched on Tuesday November 12, 2024.

Watched on Saturday September 7, 2024.

A gathering worthy of the cinema's early and late titans, with a soulful, yearning soundtrack to offset the deep sadness. Colorful, emotionally bare, and lovingly mysterious. "I can't wait to see everyone, man."

Watched on Tuesday July 23, 2024.

Will reserve a proper review after seeing Chapter 2, but this feels like the film of the year for me at this point. Ford crisscrossing Mann, the entire Western genre split into two narratives careening toward each other. A behemoth.

Solid!

Watched on Friday July 19, 2024.

H.P. Mendoza. Learn that name. One of the great genre-bending directors of the 21st century. This is MEMENTO by way of Victorian-era ghost story. Amazing.

Watched on Friday July 19, 2024.

Pauld Casting For Me prep.

A loving ode to the New Hollywood and their collective hope that aesthetic and narrative surprise can make us see the world anew, introducing unexpected possibility into the everyday. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Jason Schwartzman is one of THE actors of his generation. And Carol Kane is every part his equal.

Watched on Saturday June 15, 2024.

Structurally, very strange and uneven, but not without some solid highs. Nichols feigns like he's going for the motorcycle gang version of GOODFELLAS in the opening act, but the film evolves into something more subdued and forlorn as it progresses. Butler's performance seems to sit on the border between classic Hollywood charisma and mumbly method brooding. Whenever he shares the screen with Hardy, maybe our greatest modern Method actor outside of DDL, the film ignites. But since this is a story of inevitable decline, in both the club lifestyle/values and one man's freedom, the film fittingly ends with a version of domesticization that doesn't feel entirely like a betrayal, just a compromise.

Hits differently now that I'm a parent. What could have easily been a genre gimmick is anything but in the hands of Rian Johnson, a master of understanding how to visualize the intersection of emotion, narrative & style. At times this is Carpenter, and at others Ford. Kind of a masterpiece and maybe the best X-Men movie.

Watched on Wednesday July 3, 2024.

Watched on Saturday March 23, 2024.

Watched on Friday June 28, 2024.

Watched on Saturday May 25, 2024.

Watched on Monday June 24, 2024.

The young and old tend to hold each other in contempt, in disgust. What was once ours is now theirs, and what was once theirs is now ours. They don't understand each other, and never really will. We won't be the same, but we come from the same place.

Breillat revels in this dynamic, and sees sex as the one wild card setting our expectations of intent ablaze. That the old and the young are forbidden to be intimate is always an underlying factor, but LAST SUMMER exists within the spectrum of how this prickly thematic and aesthetic space can reveal something altogether more honest and primal about relationships than than societal norms. It's ultimately a film of urges and retreats, children forced into adulthood all too soon, and adults seeking one last peek at sexual liberation, and ultimately, close-ups of forbidden ecstasy held in long take.

I feel very comfortable saying that Zoe Ziegler gives the performance of the year in this strange, beguiling requiem.

Watched on Thursday June 13, 2024.

The great DTV action films of the last 10 years are the modern day equivalents of subversive B-westerns from the 1940s-1950s. Both push the boundaries of style and theme within genres that are seemingly one note. This film is a great example of their overlap - Efficient, brutal, and populated with tortured characters embroiled in a multifaceted conflicts of the heart and soul. Bren Foster's martial arts style is nothing short of furious, and this often brilliant film becomes a portrait of a life's work leveling punishing kicks. Without giving too much away, the film's final act will go down as one of the great action set-pieces of the 21st century for its relentlessness and precision alone. That there is so much at stake emotionally makes the round robin of fisticufs even more harrowing.

I'm sure much has been made of the emo script and shifty direction, but I was most taken with Justice Smith's incredible lead performance. Beautifully embodies the young person frozen by an omniscient, unexplainable fear of taking chances.

Watched on Monday June 10, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday June 11, 2024.

Onscreen chemistry isn't manufactured by marketing or hype; it's born from the facial expressions and body movements of two actors trying to figure each other out. These two superstars, and their brilliant director, understand the power of the honeymoon stage. In a relationship, and in a movie. The power of sexual attraction, the power of surprise, the power of connection. One second you're life has a steady, predictable tempo, and the next you're heart is beating so fast that only disruption makes sense.

Richard Linklater might just be the great American filmmaker of the last 35 years. He doesn't have Malick's poetic gravity, Spike Lee's gravitas, Lynch's endless strangeness, Reichardt's unwavering rigor, or Mann's crushing aesthetic eye. Instead, Linklater has something I can only describe as humble effortlessness. All of his films move through time and space and conflict without a doubt. They are all indebted to the mystery of life's random encounters and surprising developments. For that reason, his films are both open and carefully protected. I loved this movie the same way I love all of Linklater's films - because they embody the filmmaker's fascination with our most heightened moments of impulsiveness. Sometimes, we can't control ourselves, and that's beautiful.

U.S. Premiere

1. Caught by the Tides
2. Hard Truths
3. The Shrouds
4. Eephus

U.S. Premiere.

1. Juror #2
2. Nickel Boys
3. Here
4. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1
5. The Beast
6. Life After Fighting
7. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
8. The Dead Don't Hurt
9. Last Summer
10. One More Shot

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

1. Miller's Crossing
2. Inside Llewyn Davis
3. Fargo
4. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
5. No Country for Old Men
6. The Big Lebowski
7. Raising Arizona
8. The Man Who Wasn't There
9. Barton Fink
10. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Power of the Dog
2. The Woman Who Ran
3. The Card Counter
4. The Inheritance
5. Undine
6. The Real Thing
7. Sentinelle
8. The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)
9. Cry Macho
10. Labyrinth of Cinema

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

Still need to see - Bird.

1. A Perfect World
2. Unforgiven
3. Flags of Our Fathers
4. White Hunter, Black Heart
5. The Bridges of Madison County
6. Million Dollar Baby
7. Bronco Billy
8. The Outlaw Josey Wales
9. Letters from Iwo Jima
10. Sudden Impact

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

1. The Day He Arrives
2. In Front of Your Face
3. Right Now, Wrong Then
4. The Woman Who Ran
5. Hotel by the River
6. On the Occasion of ing the Turning Gate
7. Night and Day
8. Yourself and Yours
9. Woman on the Beach
10. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Hard Boiled
2. The Killer
3. Windtalkers
4. Heroes Shed No Tears
5. Face/Off
6. Mission: Impossible II
7. Manhunt
8. Hard Target
9. Paycheck
10. Broken Arrow

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

1. Unstoppable
2. Déjà Vu
3. Crimson Tide
4. Enemy of the State
5. Domino
6. Days of Thunder
7. Man on Fire
8. Spy Game
9. The Last Boy Scout
10. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Zodiac
2. Gone Girl
3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
4. Panic Room
5. The Social Network
6. Se7en
7. The Game
8. Fight Club
9. Alien³
10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

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

1. Dying at Grace
2. School of Rock
3. Time of the Wolf
4. Café Lumière
5. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
6. Memories of Murder
7. Dogville
8. Elephant
9. Los Angeles Plays Itself
10. All the Real Girls

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Miami Vice
2. Flags of Our Fathers
3. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
4. Happy Feet
5. Inland Empire
6. Volver
7. The Departed
8. Triad Election
9. Letters from Iwo Jima
10. Children of Men

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. JFK
2. Natural Born Killers
3. Born on the Fourth of July
4. Any Given Sunday
5. Nixon
6. Savages
7. Wall Street
8. The Doors
9. U Turn
10. Platoon

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Pompeii
2. The Three Musketeers
3. Shopping
4. Monster Hunter
5. Event Horizon
6. Resident Evil: Retribution
7. Soldier
8. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
9. Resident Evil
10. Mortal Kombat

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The King of Comedy
2. After Hours
3. Taxi Driver
4. The Irishman
5. Casino
6. The Age of Innocence
7. Kundun
8. Raging Bull
9. The Color of Money
10. GoodFellas

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I love everything here except the last two, and those I really like.

1. Wendy and Lucy
2. Meek's Cutoff
3. First Cow
4. Certain Women
5. Old Joy
6. Night Moves
7. River of Grass

1. Summer Hours
2. Irma Vep
3. Personal Shopper
4. Clouds of Sils Maria
5. Cold Water
6. Demonlover
7. Boarding Gate
8. Clean
9. Late August, Early September
10. Something in the Air

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Blow Out
2. Femme Fatale
3. Dressed to Kill
4. Carlito's Way
5. Mission to Mars
6. Casualties of War
7. The Fury
8. Hi, Mom!
9. Snake Eyes
10. Phantom of the Paradise

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. First Cow
2. The History of the Seattle Mariners
3. Undine
4. The Cordillera of Dreams
5. Da 5 Bloods
6. Time
7. Fire Will Come
8. Driveways
9. Martin Eden
10. Dear Comrades!

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Based on U.S. release dates.

1. Zama
2. A Bread Factory: Part One: For the Sake of Gold

   This is a stand-in for A BREAD FACTORY in total.

3. El Mar La Mar
4. The Tale
5. Lean on Pete
6. 24 Frames
7. Bisbee '17
8. First Reformed
9. Western
10. If Beale Street Could Talk

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Transit
2. The Irishman
3. Ash Is Purest White
4. A Hidden Life
5. Hotel by the River
6. High Flying Bird
7. Uncut Gems
8. Ad Astra
9. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
10. Long Day's Journey into Night

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

1. Song to Song
2. Wonderstruck
3. Nocturama
4. The Work
5. Phantom Thread
6. Ex Libris: The New York Public Library
7. Personal Shopper
8. Logan Lucky
9. The Woman Who Left
10. Dawson City: Frozen Time

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Like Someone in Love
2. The Lone Ranger
3. Museum Hours
4. Drug War
5. Leviathan
6. To the Wonder
7. The Wind Rises
8. Before Midnight
9. At Berkeley
10. The Wolf of Wall Street

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Closed Curtain
2. The Immigrant
3. Two Days, One Night
4. Goodbye to Language
5. Manakamana
6. Stray Dogs
7. Boyhood
8. The Strange Little Cat
9. Force Majeure
10. Pompeii

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Cemetery of Splendor
2. Knight of Cups
3. Right Now, Wrong Then
4. Toni Erdmann
5. O.J.: Made in America
6. Certain Women
7. Elle
8. Aquarius
9. Everybody Wants Some!!
10. Things to Come

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. This Is Not a Film
2. Zero Dark Thirty
3. The Turin Horse
4. The Day He Arrives
5. It's Such a Beautiful Day
6. Miss Bala
7. The Deep Blue Sea
8. Girl Walk // All Day
9. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
10. Barbara

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Mysteries of Lisbon
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
3. The Tree of Life
4. Certified Copy
5. In the Family
6. A Separation
7. Nostalgia for the Light
8. Margaret
9. Hugo
10. Drive

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

• White Material
• Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl
• Father of My Children
• Amer
• Everyone Else
• Another Year
• True Grit
• Lourdes
• The Social Network
• Secret Sunshine

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