Recent posts tagged movies
2023
What I Risk Being Bored For
For any one truly good book I would risk being bored by ten more.
Blow-Up
Michelangelo Antonioni's classic of mod London gives us a man who spends his life looking without really seeing.
12 Monkeys
Terry Gilliam's paranoid time-travel labyrinth is less an SF film than a story of the fear of madness, but no less powerful for it
Moving Pictures
On trying to jumpstart my writing about movies again.
2022
A Mouthful Of Ideas
Comparing and contrasting two critics, Roger Ebert and Serge Daney.
All I Want For Christmas Is A Few 4K Titles
A wishlist of stuff I'd like to see reissued as 4K BDs.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Chantal Akerman's singular masterwork observes three days in the life of a Belgian widow with a precision and unblinking patience that becomes all-encompassing.
American Psycho
Mary Harron's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's divisive novel amplifies its satirical power without making its protagonist into an antihero.
Ring Around The Story
A few thoughts on "Shang-Chi" and the benefits of efficient story construction.
A Hundred Films, A Hundred Years
In my humble opinion, here's a great way to spend a few hundred hours.
Arrival
An actual SF movie, not just a tarted-up shoot-'em-up, both because of the breadth of its ideas and how they are lovingly personalized.
Wrath Of Man
Closest in spirit to the bleak noirs of the 1970s, where the "good" guys are only slightly less terrible than the competition, and where everyone is staring down from the edge of the same abyss.
Titane
Julia Ducournau's Titane has at its heart a great tenderness, something you don't expect from a story about a sociopath who kills with a hairpin, then apparently has sex with a car and becomes pregnant with its child.
Free Your Mind, Guy
Or at least, free your Guy, and the rest will follow. (On "Free Guy" and some thoughts related.)
2021
Canonical Criteria
Friends of mine and I were talking about the idea of a canon or pantheon of great movies, and how to select them. We had a fun debate about the criteria, and eventually I drew up a list.
Latent Images
Cult movies? In my UHD 4K format? It's more common than I thought it would be.
Plan B
What lessons there are to learn from Bad Movies We Love.
A Thing To Marvel At
The issue I have with tentpole franchise entertainment is not that it's unentertaining, but that it provides the wrong lessons for creators.
Dune (1984) [2021 review]
The mere fact that David Lynch's Dune was made at all, and in the Hollywood of the early 1980s to boot, is something of a miracle. Would that it was a better adaptation of the source material, or just a better movie, period.
Pi
Darren Aronofsky's ingenious micro-budget debut, twenty-plus years later, holds up better than some of his bigger-budgeted efforts
I Love Maria
A kooky example of science fiction from Hong Kong, a cinematic world that has relatively little SF to begin with.
The Matrix
Twenty years later, the Wachowskis' digital fable still stands tall, outliving the slickness of the moment and attempts to misappropriate it
Tenet
At the end of the day, it's just a fancy excuse to shoot a bunch of scenes in reverse.
Sexy Beast
Ben Kingsley as a frothing mad gangster is only the first of many pleasures in this sleeper-gem of a crime drama that's only gotten better with age
Apocalypse Now: Final Cut
The film is worthy of the best kind of jealousy, the kind that makes you want to go out and do something just as visionary and overwhelming.
