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probably the most homesickness inducing film ive seen in quite some time. made me think and reflect a lot abt my own family, and culture. Theres a unique homeliness in this film

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

very good memory montage, with overexposure

A tedious, earnest and heartfelt depiction of loneliness

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Coppola's use of sound in this films is impeccable. Right from the setpiece where harry walks into the elevator, and notices 2 familiar faces, the tension, the anguish and paranoia is squeezed out of the shot, through humming and distorted noise of the lift, the scene slowly unfolds into the character forced into a corner, the camera closing in on the right moment, making the space bigger for him, and each movement gets increasingly tense.

Lit in grim and shadowy shots, the color is peeled off the frame, exactly like how intense voyeurism has sucked the color out of harry's life, he is human, but cant express, loves, but cant give in, wants to reach out but cant put his hand forth.

Very intelligently structured, playing out against 1 taped conversation, which gets more intense as the narrative plays out and collapses at a heartbreaking anxious moment towards the end, the film is a p good slow burn decay of a voyeur

Watched on Sunday March 16, 2025.

Rare indian film where almost every cut is resourceful in building up the forthcoming sequences. Even in of writing, mithya's character has very neat simmering layers underneath. You can feel a child's discontent brewing and eating him on the inside. Pretty well acted

Watched on Wednesday February 26, 2025.

Watched on Saturday February 22, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday February 18, 2025.

sell out hwood movie, not like lighthouse

Watched on Thursday February 13, 2025.

Such a tender and affectionate portrait of the wonder that his biology. Little movements of our bodies lay bare the wonder in body language, in which regard, animals are even more fascinating, because of how purely instinctive, innocent and equally dangerous they are. ed by a delicate, and soothing soundtrack to complement its craft

Watched on Friday February 7, 2025.

Rewatched after 9 long years. When this came out, i watched it in theatres with my parents coz i was a bit of a shahid kapoor fan back then

On the rewatch my impression for this film has become very dilute, but i had fun, i think it couldve been way better if it wasnt such an overstuffed film, because it feels like it is very obsessed to commentate on, and converge every plotline. Visually its ok, but idk why it feels undercooked.

Absolutely astonishing long take of cabiria walking back, after being heartbroken, and left for death, with a musical troupe singing around her, the shot slowly, closes in on her face, beaming with bittersweet tears, ready for yet another day of fighting, yet another shot at life, after being hopelessly betrayed, conned by opportunistic people, again, again and again, she just weeps, destroys herself, against all of her anguish, she does pull herself up again, what else could she do, she's just gotta live. So well acted, top notch.

Love it

Slow motions, ultra closeups and other such camera shots are usually used as nothing but gimmicks in narrative. But not in this one.

Every single close-up, the sweat beads, the tennis back and forths, the sweaty naked athletic bodies, all shoot the sexual energy in the film, every scene of this tight screenplay oozes that.

Luca uses tennis and the world of sport to get into the minds and lives of tashi, a prodigal player who projects her own hyper competitiveness onto her husband after her career prematurely gets shunned due to a serious injury.

This film is all about sex and power, with tennis as window dressing. Art, is not exactly the best player when hes young, but the competitiveness in him, the chase to reach his friend's charisma and status, fuels him, it shoots him upto the level of top level tour athletes, but once his fuel tank runs dry, his wife looks at him with contempt. The narrative is brilliantly paced with treachery, toxic power dynamics of hypergamy all unfolding underneath the garb of a low stakes challengers tournament.

Its about how these obsessed characters traverse their journey of love, competition, ego and sexuality, to fuel desire in each other, it makes them, it also hurts and breaks them. Its a very interesting parallel, because professional sport is the most raw and unhinged form of toxicity if you think about it, you win you have everything- the giltz and the glamour and the status, you lose, you dont just lose money, you are shat on, made fun of, your self esteem comes down, its primal and animalistic down to its core.

The narrative would absolutely not have worked had the director gone for a realistic sports game, the whole film, and the shots that unfold have a delicious, horny energy to them, biggest credit for which would go trent reznor's multilayered and pumping techno soundtrack. It brings out the desperation, envy and fury these characters are facing. No credit should be taken from guadagnino however, all the character building scenes are very impactful to keep this story from being a b grade schlock , he often uses low angles when characters are in anxious contemplation, and will switch to eye level cuts once the internal turmoil will calm down, all his shots are awesome

Ophuls type revolving camera, the most uniranian film out of iran ive seen, like it

Fine setup, JNW films don't judge their characters, and show us everything, good, bad and ugly, but Oshima is too desperate to drive home his point on how the young couple would fall back to the same shit they keep wasting their youth on, and would never crawl out of it. To achieve this, he forces the final few scenes which felt very unnatural to me as a viewer and left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth

Watched on Monday January 6, 2025.

This just felt like oshima philosophizing, and i wasnt in the mood for that

Watched on Saturday December 28, 2024.

My nostalgia betrayed me into believing this is still funny, its not.

I have never seen a child performance more stomach turning and disturbing than this. When the little boy sheds a tear for the first time after almost 40 minutes into the film, it broke me. Its such a strong scene of an emotional breakdown, but it creeps you out, because we are looking at a child, who has lost the childhood in him, he doesnt think, feel, emote or behave like other children. His shitty selfish negligent parents, and the world around him, has beaten it off of him. He is not a boy anymore.

If you've read the Truffaut review for this film, that pretty much sums not only this film, but Nicholas ray's style in general. "It's the triumph of the heart over the mind", ray, instead of creating anthropological sermons, or mindless spectacle, opts for creating, free-flowing emotional scenes, using the western setting as merely window dressing, as it its heart, Johnny guitar, is about a man's quest for love and redemption.

meh

Sweet film, specially the scenes with the brothers quarrelling and getting paranoid over covid protols

ok ok

fun

One of the tightest stylistic contemporary films i saw at IFFK. The director is in full control of space, midshots and closeups here, and uses them extremely well, for the testosterone heavy climax, the twist at the end. Even more impressive is the visual humour infused, right into the heart of this psychological rollercoaster of the horse jockey, remo, who is a worn out machinery clog for greedy businessmen. His love life is out of rails, his career going haywire, he spirals into an identity finding quest, shattering his whole personality, even his gender, this weird arc is tragico-humorous, with hilarious shots of him urinating in public, sleeping on an escalator, and somehow surviving assassination attempts. He decides to born anew, but theres a pretty sweet twist, when he has almost won redemption. Yea it is pretentious and takes plot conveniences in some parts, but it is a visual delight, with strong emotional arcs for both the jockeys

Watched on Monday December 16, 2024.

mirnal sen is a painter/director. Amazing astonishing precise right down to every cut

Watched on Monday December 16, 2024.

Really impressive structure, feels like a travellogue which envelopes a story, the travellogue and narration, forming the crux of the interpersonal drama between the central characters.

Gomes scopes out some delicious black and white forest and urban imagery to satirize european gaze on the orient. Dreadful events and plot points are literally just narrated through, or merely hinted at, but never shown directly. The majority of this film happens out of frame if looked at, from a plot perspective. That however is not the aim of the filmmaker.

Gomes goes deeper into the attitudes of the white man on the orient, and changes rhythym based on characters, initially the attempt to understand and integrate oneself in a foreign culture is less, and the film is wilfully detached, in the 2nd journey however, there is much more coalescence, companionship, attempt to empathise, feeling of estrangement, its more human, because the woman whose journey is more human.

Its a very inventive way of looking at colonial gaze, where, amidst all turmoil, the privileged oppressor, is only at unrest due to a romantic panic, and while the narration is completely about the characters' lives, what is shown through frames is oriental culture.

Watched on Sunday December 15, 2024.

Watched on Sunday December 15, 2024.

made me laugh, made me cry, made me clap.

Watched on Saturday December 14, 2024.

Zzzzzzzzz

cool neo-noir aesthetics, cronenberg uses a lynch type color when the central character visits the videodrome repository, the set design, lighting and color of walls is very evident of detective novels, and lynch films. The red dresses, femme fetales, late night US rotten urban life and voyeurism, however, is all done to death now, and beyond that, this feels slightly gimmicky. Very cool however, and p good sense of atmospherics

kuch yaar nazar nahi aata, ghar baar nazar nahi aata, sansaar nazar nahi aata

Watched on Saturday December 7, 2024.

Watched on Monday December 2, 2024.

nothing to say, perfection

Watched on Saturday November 30, 2024.

Gave it a second shot, i hate the shehnai or whatever indian instrument they use to generate sad music, somebody tell the director to not spam bgm in every scene, it leaves no impact then.

The villain is played by Anurag Kashyap, and idk why he eats chicken everytime he robs someone's house, its prolly supposed to show how bedard he is, devouring a meal while murdering inncocent civilians. Theres a lot of these exaggerations in the film and a few times they work ok considering the direction the filmmaker wanted to go, but then he also had to stuff cringeass comedic bits, done to dust revenge tropes and bad acting by many side characters. And it doesnt stop there, no sir, it goes to the length of a school kid trying to confront the guy who beat her to a pulp to ask him what was her fault, with that gandu shehnai music being spammed till my ears bled, and it tops it with the corniest plot twist reveal to shove its message down our throats

amazing culmination of lost love, desires, and a calm acceptance of the said regrets

Gertrud's final words are "One day your visit will also be a memory, like the ones which i revisit and plunge myself into, while awaiting death". It Hits hard after her character arc of youth, desire and ion for romance, all rotten and withered away with age and crumbled romances, all that has remained is the present, everything else faded away, and all that has remained is a friendship which never could transpire into romance, but was deeper and more lasting than anything to do with the encounters of ion. All her past is just a distant memory now

Trying to cover the major works of Hiroshi Teshigahara, Shohei Imamura, Kobayashi, Oshima, Seijun suzuki and other directors whose names i am forgetting right now

• Woman in the Dunes
• The Face of Another
• Vengeance Is Mine

• Rear Window
• Marnie
• Rope
• Red River
• His Girl Friday
• Bringing Up Baby
• Scarface
• The Big Sleep
• Vertigo
• The Apartment

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