Nothing has changed.
But you have.
Six years since I saw this. A lifetime ago. It feels like yesterday. A different film this time. That's part of the point. Its twists less a coup than clues undeciphered. We are beholden to our prejudiced perspectives, in cinema as much as in life. The past behind, the future before. All at a remove, lives glanced in a glass. We want to go back and can't wait to get away. A relationship, a…
Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"
What curious creatures we humans are, with the intelligence to understand our animalistic urges yet not the inhibitions to overcome them. Fatty food, we understand, tastes good to trick us into eating it aplenty. So it is with sex, procreation and pleasure inherently intertwined, evolutionary urges linking lust and love under the auspices of attraction. Stranger by the Lake is a microcosmic masterpiece, its streamlined screenplay and sole setting condensing these…
Vintage late Loach, heavy-handed to what you might call a fault if it wasn't completely understandable—the man's being saying the same thing for going on sixty years, who wouldn't shout when everything's just kept getting worse? Has the sympathy to understand just why those near the bottom punch down, and the solidarity to still hope we don't have to accept it.
Never quite lives up to its grisly intro's potential, veering off to gentle comedy and a low-key love story instead. Atwill has a blast hamming it up; hard not to go along with him.
Dear Diary,
Today I showed The Big Shave as part of a presentation on Scorsese, to demonstrate the early emergence of stylistic and visceral tendencies in his direction. A grown man shrieked a bit. Twice. It was the best day ever.
Certain films you love because they touch you personally. Others you love because they tell a story so gripping you feel part of it yourself. Some you love for their part in shaping you as a cinephile, even as a person. Then there are the handful of films you love simply because you must love: because they represent so bold an authorial vision, so striking a view of the world, so wholly unique a perspective on life through cinema, that…
