In the preface to her book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987 - 1993, Sarah Schulman, who co-produced this film, writes:
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When it came to making our feature-length documentary film, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, [director] Jim [Hubbard] and I met with several prominent funders of documentaries. We were told over and over that a documentary film has to have four to six characters the viewer can follow on…
The sense memory of an ice cream cone on the beach, or peeling an orange. The things we long to run from and long to come back to. The way the past is alive in the present. This film is so very alive.
Watched this movie about the final hours of a movie palace in the final hours of 2021 via Metrograph At Home. A movie about movies, about how our relationship to movies is changing, about movie theaters as places of worship. Very long takes, very little dialogue. Palpable longing--for the past, for a connection that will never happen. The sense of time passing, the way the theater feels haunted by its own glory days. The solitude of the woman who works…
A film that really cares about the experiences of children. Wise and alive, with amazing performances from both Phoenix and his young co-star, Woody Norman, who truly gives one of the most extraordinary performances I've ever seen from a child actor. In some ways adults are just big children, doing the best we can, fucking up and then--ideally--trying to atone for our mistakes (Phoenix's Johnny certainly has lost, oversized kid energy in a lot of ways) and kids are far wiser than most adults give them credit for.
"She's the only home you have, Thomas."
Warner Bros. was gonna resurrect the Matrix series with our without one or two Wachowskis at the helm. We'll never know, of course, but I suspect the film we would have gotten without Lana coming back for this one would have been more geared to audience expectations, more concerned with replicating the "cool" factor of the originals, and, quite possibly, much safer and duller as a result.
I love this film. Both the…
Just outstanding. There’s so much energy and vividness in the production—the background details, the way the camera moves and sweeps through it all—that you feel you could step into it and find a fully realized city thrumming with life all around you. It’s a New York in transition, in ruins and beautiful. The film feels effortless in the way it finds larger meanings in its story. For instance, in the opening tracking shot, you see what some of those ruins…
Fuck, man, I don't know. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley. I am down for some valley mythologizing, and I fully expected this film to make me heartsick for California. And in fits and starts, it does. Anderson is meticulous, of course. The little living rooms of houses in the flatness of the valley, the billboards, the restaurants, all of it is perfect. Most of all, the light is perfect, and it was the golden sunlight that moved…
More than perhaps any other film, Ghostbusters leaves me feeling torn--trapped, as it were--between my childhood self and my adult self. I just watched it for the first time in many, many years. There's no denying that it was for me a childhood touchstone, *the* touchstone, a film that, for a while, I felt far more unbridled enthusiasm for than Star Wars or Back to the Future or any other blockbuster that kids of my generation loved. I don't feel…