4v291o

Watched on Monday June 2, 2025.

Godard's prophetic work shows how May 68 was fated to be an imioned movement yet little more than symbolic. Driven by the era's vigorous production of political/literary theory, the radicals here are steeped in intellectual material and hollow in their approach to praxis. So once the homeowners finally arrive, violent revolution is left behind as a mere summer curiosity; forgotten once school reopened. The eye-popping colours make this abandonment feel just right as they all added to the facetiousness anyway. The conversation with Jeanson is really all this film needed to be.

Watched on Sunday June 1, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 31, 2025.

Radical even by revisionist standards, Jarmusch's western is really a night odyssey film. William does not become but rather is the eponymous figure even before the film begins - orphaned, jilted by his lover and far away from home for a job he is cheated out of. For the Native American Nobody, helping William is a mystical act of gratitude for a long-dead poet who gave the outcast something to hold on to. The glittering mud and painted stars above Machine signal what a surreal journey he is to embark on - from the world of the living to that of the dead.

Adoor's most surgical work and a painterly reflection on the terror that boils beneath feudal ennui. A feckless patriarch oppresses by his mere presence, whose entitlement is enabled by a meek sister too bound to rebel; while the eldest is all too careful about her own interests. Being ensconced in red, Sridevi is the only symbol of vitality in a world that feels bereft of any life. There is a folkloric quality to rats being the victims of Unni's cowardice. The thunderous climax is such a disruption to the prevailing form that it is akin to a nightmare of self-realisation instead of reality.

Watched on Friday May 30, 2025.

Bird's consolidation of a formula that could work when repeated was essential in Ghost Protocol since prior to it, this franchise really had no defining quality. And yet, Abrams's attempt is one of the finest; a gritty, dark iteration where Ethan's personal life is jeopardised. Thanks to that, there is something real at stake here. And in hindsight, knowing what the Rabbit's Foot is only adds to Hoffman's menace. The grainy imagery, handheld cameras and even the recoil of each bullet provides a weight and viscerality that would disappear in the anti-physics films that follow.

Watched on Sunday May 25, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 25, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 21, 2025.

A Lennon-worshipping poet and a mime dressed as an Ardhanarishwar are the jester duo in the home of a far-right extremist. Fratricide determines the fate of a pair of illegitimate siblings. Love turns a pawn caught in this dirty game into the embodiment of vengeance. Shakespearean in its scope, one of Kashyap's finest works depicts Rajasthan as the duality it constantly exists in - a land with vast histories and where the present is constantly burdened by them. Dileep is so many Indian college students; bargaining with the devil initially to survive and being too foolish to ever realise that.

At nine films now, it is only natural that the romance is wearing off. Instead of uniquely depicting how our ragtag team goes about saving the world, the energies have now shifted to showing how creatively its destruction can be plotted. And for a series that has always teetered the sci-fi genre, it feels like a betrayal that the nemesis here is akin to a supernatural force. But Cruise certainly knows how to add enough heart to make a trip to the theatre worthwhile. That entire Sevastopol sequence, which has no cutaways, is one of the finest in the entire series.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Brooks may have been targeting television but his work feels uncannily prescient for the internet age - when broadcasting often gives preference to banality for the sake of 'reality'. As the dinner scene unravels, Mr. Yeager's gradual loss of control shows how theatrical the camera renders what is in front of it. And really, can a family maintain its normalcy when people looking like astronauts are spectrally hovering around them at all times? If Brooks's final stunt was once a comical exaggeration, today it is an eerie prediction of the limits creators will go to for creating an audience.

By this point, Szulkin had already established his fatalistic brand of cinema. So the trick he pulls here is pleasantly welcome yet also feels necessary. After all, it is too bleakly Kafkaesque a premise - offering freedom to a criminal in a jail from which they cannot escape, treating them as a hero where they are sent and then presenting their grotesque death as the week's entertainment - to offer anything worthwhile in sticking to tragedy. So dehumanised is this world that here, rebellion is a gibberish signature and love has to be bought for a price that guarantees the execution of fate.

It's a curious route Dassin takes here with his formula from Rififi, replacing the stoic, Melville-esque style of that classic for an iridescent and silly heist film, set amidst the European high life of the '60s and vestiges of colonial romanticism of the Orient. The central act, without which Mission Impossible's Black Vault sequence would be nonexistent, does save this otherwise hollow work. And in the fate that is eventually dealt to the gang, perhaps owing to prevailing norms of morality, he still manages to demonstrate the incurable nature of materialism. Still, a most peculiar film.

Despite the meta nature of the genre, I do not another found footage film that deals with the subterfuge of it all so well. Gavin is made into a lampoon of the deluded film student yet his silliest belief remains that the camera does not lie. On top of it all is the plight of his family. In investigating an investigation, Myers's film provides serious questions about the reliability of visual evidence and the very nature of videography - leaving the most violent event to our imagination. Therefore, the spine-chilling mid-credit sequence could nonetheless have been omitted.

It makes sense that Wan held such clout for nearly two decades over the horror genre; he is primarily a fan of its capacity to purely entertain. His sophomore feature is leagues ahead of his torture porn debut, displaying how for a filmmaker like him, style very much is the substance. A ludicrous story told in an overdramatised fashion a la Michael Bay, cranked-up tungsten balancing that creates a gloomy, video game atmosphere, jump cuts and TV sounds, with a heavy dose of special effects - all of it comes together in a carnivalesque celebration of what horror was in the noughties.

An unmistakably '70s film, spectrally moving across bars, gyms and farmlands to show the quiet, daily tragedies of proletarian life. Unlike Tully, who is at the end of his rope at only 30, Ernie is saved by his girlfriend's pregnancy and the decision to pursue a more meaningful life. Keach's dejection at his paltry winnings conveys the same pathos as Terry Malloy's agony, without the need for a monologue. What Huston has created here is a specifically masculine despondency, exemplified by how Earl is willing to have a talk with Tully, despite Oma's hollering, and the final scene at the bar.

Szulkin has the aesthetics of a post-nuclear-apocalyptic setting down pat, especially the sense of a world bereft of any vitality. But it isn't in the images but in hope being a product manufactured to prolong these doomed lives where the bleakness becomes smothering. There may be few more damning metaphors for Soviet socialism than a ravaged dystopia where religion continues to exist as an opiate and an economy of scarcity is created in anticipation of a future that will never arrive. Whether it is a dream or not, the finale offers Soft a much-needed light at the end of the tunnel.

As Soubeyran's chickens come home to roost, it reveals his egotistical persona and the history of a wealthy, inbred family; but one can't help feel somewhat for Ugoline, caught in the midst of his uncle's greed and his own stupidity. The very countryside that seemed playful becomes a site of immense pain and tragedy and deservedly so, as the complicity of the residents owing to their tribalistic faith tears a family apart - in so many ways. The variety of ways Berri employs in depicting Beart's angelic face - from the dramatic to the painterly - visually elevates this even more. A masterpiece.

The past as a washed, soap opera world whereas reality having the gritty saturation of standard Korean crime films engenders a welcome stylistic duality in what is otherwise an overwrought thriller. When a plot is progressing at two twists per minute, it is only natural that the surprises wear off eventually. But what is annoying to witness is how thrills and twists are treated as jump-scares. Still, it's an endlessly watchable film with an extremely bleak ending, made all the more harrowing by a coda that is also emblematic of its forced attempt at creating neat narrative ties.

An arcadian French landscape, bathed in such a radiant glow yet not entirely utopian - as evidenced from the same glow intensifying into a domineering golden during a catastrophic dust storm. Berri's portrayal of the scheming Soubeyran and the bumpkin Ugolin is most curious, showing their atrocities as if they are mere countryside eccentricities - I doubt I have ever seen a murder be underplayed so severely. But it is Depardieu's enterprising Jean, adamant about turning his inheritance into a prized farmland, that kept winning me over and causing heartache at every turn.

It's pretty clear now that Marich has a strong understanding of how to build up suspense and create an atmosphere or anxiety and terror. These three films, which are really more like episodes of a miniseries at this point, show an ability to use bathos quite unlike other filmmakers. This unknown terror that has supposedly been haunting these unruly expanses of desert land for generations, lurking in abandoned mines and ghost towns, has been built up for long enough now - so it remains to be seen what the pay-off will be. I only hope it is not too prolonged.

Pretty much anyone would hate a haughty, scheming overachiever like Tracy Flick. But when a teacher more than twice her age cannot keep it in his pants and another deliberately sabotages all her efforts in a second, it becomes apparent why she needs to be who she is. With such well-rounded characters all around, Payne's acerbic satire may well be more than just about American high school and politics, but the very fallibility of democracy itself. Jim's fate, both inside and outside the school, coupled with his swollen eye makes him a noir protagonist by the end.

The tagline of SBB-TV is 'Reality - We Create It' and these words are always prominent on the screen yet never questioned. The potency of Szulkin's ability to create worlds so concisely deserves a great deal of recognition - here, a police state, washed in blue and with vampiric Martians. Forty years on, depicting the media as the state's most effective apparatus remains just as true - where political assassinations are appropriated as part of the State's own narrative and screens carefully depict the theatre that reality is being forced to become.

Though this is the second part of the story, it feels a lot like a sequel. Mesrine's personality having been established already, Richet gives us more time with him as a person instead of coldly leafing through his life. Cassel gives arguably his finest performance. While seamlessly showing the changes in him, from his megalomania, revolutionary delusions and even his attachments, he nonetheless maintains a steady thread of the charming yet mercurial Frenchman underneath. Overall, a really well-done gangster epic that does not exploit style as a means of mythologizing.

The adjective 'cold' gets thrown around often when speaking of gangster films but rarely does it fit a film as well as this. The little to no value attributed to the lives of these figures (they can hardly be called characters) is made that much more disturbing by them being real people. Apart from his volatile attitude, Jacques is an unique gangster, oscillating between his violent exploits and a strange desire to live a straight life. It's hard to imagine an American film so easily dismissing the main character's family at the drop of a hat, without so much as an onscreen goodbye.

Watched on Tuesday April 29, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.

Tarsem's magnum opus understands two essential aspects of storytelling - it is participatory, involving the listener as much as the teller, and the telling can often necessitate interruptions. Born from Roy's drug-addled fantasies, the world of his story does not cower to the dictates of history - moving from Udaipur to China - but rather, what he and Alexandria need from it. A keyhole acting as a pinhole camera and a stop-motion surgery sequence all attest to the mind-boggling levels of imagination at play here. Objectively, one of the most breathtaking works of visual art ever made.

Watched on Friday April 25, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 24, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 22, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 21, 2025.

It's perfectly believable that Carax is the kind of eccentric who'd explain Plato to a child. Rohrwacher returns to her early career depiction of children as embodiments of rupture in a world numbed to reason. The sheer simplicity of depicting a most common urban paradox - messages on walls asking for bills to not be stuck themselves being so - is for her, a sandbox of imagination. As the kid creates a rift between images and reality, what follows is a series of sequences that in their purest form, depict liberation - ranging from the monotony of modern life to limitations of human perception.

For the cornucopia that Coogler has created here, what stands out is how raunchy this is compared to similar Hollywood fare. Jordan has a star's presence, shifting with ease between mischief, likeability and power. With its blending of such disparate themes as blues and Jim Crow South to the mafia and vampires, this is akin to a 90s anime film. What did keep it from being near-perfect for me is the initial promise of a story where music attracts the Devil, only for it to not really narratively matter except for one incredible sequence. Goransson's score deserves all the acclaim in the world.

It's hard to think of a film like this being made today - so formally audacious yet which does not take itself seriously at all. The dark style appropriately reveals the hideous past of a millionaire family and their recently deceased patriarch - whose spectral presence, coupled with a disfigured war veteran's mute scheming, creates an uneasy and at times, eerie atmosphere. If the giallo-esque violence is the more prominent formal break, lesser transgressions such as negative videos, are peppered throughout. Yet for all of this, it ends like an episode of a weekly whodunnit.

A female take on La Dolce Vita, with Sandrelli having that right balance of a vivacious yet heartbreaking performance, and oodles of sex appeal, that only actors from the '60s could so effortlessly embody. Pietrangeli shows a life of swinging between hopes and promiscuity, against her own desires, because literally anything is more welcome than the abject life that awaits Adriana at home. As the filth of the world Adriana dreams of makes itself clear, her shocking denouement appears inevitable when we reflect on that final shot, similar to Marcello's shame at the hollowness of his 'good life'

It takes about 15 minutes to tell what kind of a thriller we are in for usually and this lives up to it - an exposition heavy, pretty standard Hollywood one that thinks telephoto shots are somehow a stand-in for paranoia. What it does have going for it is Crowe - who as a dishevelled, paunchy journalist that does not understand news beyond print looks like a character he was born to play. For over two hours, it does manage to create a curious atmosphere, notwithstanding the sheer fantasy of a Democratic politician openly outing the arms industry. Also, David Harbour's character is quite neat.

A life taken, another destroyed, a family wrecked from within - before we really get to the core of any of this, two episodes are spent in a 'High and Low'-like police procedural on the difficulty of getting to the core of a simple crime. As the third episode continued, I kept feeling that it's not exactly a very complex look at contemporary teenage self-fashioning; until I realised that Barantini and company aren't offering us an introspection into a bygone ill. Rather, it is simply asking us to look around at what is a most present and urgent danger; and one that is only worsening.

That the Coens it to this film not being any deliberate commentary proves that they simply can't help their creative astuteness. If Le Carre brought to the fore how vapid the lives of spies are, Simmons's character epitomises how many non-important intrigues they must face in an increasingly paranoid world following the Cold War and 9/11. But all this does not put them above using the sudden appearance of a dildo as a gag. For most comedy filmmakers, this would be a crowning achievement but for arguably the greatest writer(s)-directors(s) of all time, it's a somewhat minor work.

If Szulkin's imagery is rooted in Eastern European cinema's preoccupation for ruins, it is equally informed by a Tarkovskian concern with isolation and adding texture to such ruins. The resultant dystopia is made that much more disturbing by making it feel like a post-nuclear-apocalypse, with only a handful of survivors. The fabled oven that supposedly plays God does no more than what its name suggests and the mid-credit scene is a damning revelation of the Soviet project. From Blade Runner and Brazil to Ghost in the Shell, the influence of Szulkin's extraordinary debut cannot be undermined.

Schroeder's New York, like Besson's, has an unfamiliar quality about it and this only works - prophetically anticipating the homogenisation of the city's image over the course of the decade. In large, rent-controlled apartments and similarly hollow office spaces, he shows the lurking darkness that goes unheard and unnoticed. If the more prominent one is Leigh's disorder, that of a perverted client does not fall far behind. A nervous Fonda is the perfect victim for the sly Leigh. A nifty '90s thriller that creates claustrophobia using the proximity of two people.

Two lost souls, drifting in a world indifferent to their existence, are saved by the choice of love and the respite it provides - this is vintage Kaurismaki territory. The intrusion of news on the war in Ukraine, once even literally treated as so when Holappa is at Ansa's house, is the film's most powerful trait, reminding us of the banality of such violence, especially to the proletariat. For longtime fans of the man, this is certainly a pleasant return but for more recent discoverers of him like us, it might feel like a lesser version of the '90s Kaurismaki we all love.

Watched on Sunday April 13, 2025.

Corbucci's fascination with mutilating the cowboy's hands - their most precious source of their power - provides a great red herring for its bathetic finale. This is a cold work of genre revisionism, that seeks to go past the mythmaking and instead expose the vulnerability of honour in a lawless state. When the final carnage comes to an end, Tigrero's expression is all that is needed to damn the sheer inhumanity of his actions. I couldn't help but wonder then that in the abundance of such bloodshed around the world today, does any perpetrator ever have Kinski's quiet moment of self-reflection?

Going back to the roots of the genre (The Blair Witch Project), this sequel asks the same question of the digital medium - isn't excessive clarity of the image an obstacle to the mystery of horror? Amidst the abundance of digital noise, a flashlight is all that aids our attempts to distinguish the varying objects of terror strewn around a seeming wasteland. But perhaps nothing is more potent in maintaining the eerie atmosphere of the region than the jolting cuts between interviews or B-roll to the first-hand footages - never allowing us to prepare for whatever unholy discovery is on its way.