George Delerue’s tragic score stabbing over the blood red title. The dolorous reading of the credits as if a speech at a funeral. The long held shot of a young woman idling towards us, her head in a book, tracked by a camera unit. As they approach, our gaze is directed not at the woman but to Raoul Coutard, the cameraman, who pivots his Cinemascope lens around and down to judge us while the voiceover intones a quote from Andre…
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Histoire(s) du cinéma 1998
Histoire(s) du Cinéma is a poetic meditation on the brilliant failure of film as art. Jean-Luc Godard’s film is deeply melancholic, celebrating cinema’s intrinsic light, but reflecting mostly on the darkness pouring in from its shared histories with the twentieth century. Godard muses on film’s dream-factory magic as demonstrated by the likes of Jean Vigo and Alfred Hitchcock, but he also accuses it of failing to confront the worst atrocities of our time, and of hiding behind its shallow entertainment…
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Burn After Reading 2008
The Coens at their potty-mouthed and plotty-worded best, revelling in their A-list cast playing against type in a gleefully convoluted screenplay, which takes in narcissism, Intelligence stupidity, internet dating, and the Russians - yep, basically all the horrors of the modern world, cluster-fucked into a portrait of the idiocy of today, plus laughs.
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Past Lives 2023
Such a pleasure to see a movie about three kind, thoughtful and respectful people, each walking a tightrope between selfish desire and selfless love, and each instinctively choosing grace in the face of sadness. The acting is beautifully judged, with an exquisite focus on body language, and while the expository script reveals itself a little too often for my liking, as does the music with its tendency towards unexceptional mood painting, for the most part Past Lives subtly explores an emotional complexity that feels very real.
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Tenet 2020
When I was a teenager I used to delight in playing my LPs backwards and listening out for all those Satanic messages. I bet if you played Tenet backwards you’d hear the devil mutter something palindromic like “what the fuck the what”
Now I’m not one to say this film made no sense at all, in fact when the music shut up for long enough that I was able to hear what the characters were actually saying, well there were…
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Wings of Desire 1987
I thought I’d mark my first year anniversary on Letterboxd by posting a review of my favourite film. It’s a long review, and personal at times, and contains some spoilers, so there you go - a few excuses for you not to read it! But thanks if any of you other Wings of Desire diehards do manage to make it through it to the end.
I recently had the pleasure of chatting about Wings with Dubthrone on his Collokino blog. It…
