have always found architecture to be a particularly underdiscussed and undervalued element of film, it’s the essential foundation for staging, and this has always been a personal favorite of mine because it’s all about architecture, both implicitly and explicitly, Tati guiding himself and the camera through and around commercial, bureaucratic structures and the hysterical ways in which they crumble physically and metaphorically under the slightest scrutiny. it plays like a silent film! maybe the best looking ever made to boot,…
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May December 2023
plays for a good hour like a slight detective movie, Portman’s Elizabeth Berry as the audience surrogate, trying to unravel the exact details of the central relationship (Portman does an outstanding job here as a sort of dead-eyed method actor who doesn’t understand boundaries), before entirely flipping the script and making you as the audience feel bad for maybe getting in too close. structurally it’s kind of fascinating, when it suddenly forces you to change perspective (multiple times, might i…
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The Rat Catcher 2023
decidedly the worst of these shorts so far (still digging the formal experimentation, however, and there’s a sequence towards the end that’s really quite thrilling) but Ralph Fiennes giving the hammiest performance of his life makes up for it
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Stop Making Sense 1984
downright religious in IMAX. true autistic excellence. only bad thing is that the setlist doesn’t include the best song from Remain In Light (Born Under Punches) but Girlfriend Is Better makes up for it. i am going to direct the Car Seat Headrest equivalent to this one day just you all wait
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Sweet Smell of Success 1957
in which you climb the ladder so high that you start to forget how far the fall is going to be. immediately and without fail introduces and drags you into so many of the most contemptible characters in all of cinema and the streets they pollute, every step that Curtis makes (in his best performance ever) lined with the poison of everybody he’s stepped on before. there’s so few films i’ve ever seen that straddle the line so effectively between…
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Barry Lyndon 1975
perfect movie, masterpiece, Kubrick’s best, etc etc etc you’ve heard it all. enough gorgeous landscapes in this for the entire medium to go on for the next hundred years. i can never watch this again without my mind immediately going to the 21 Savage edit
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High Plains Drifter 1973
“I knew you was cruel, but I didn’t know how far you could go.”
”Well, you still don’t.”the logical extreme of the wandering cowboy in a world unbound by morals, Clint as a completely demonic rapist leviathan of bloodshed and pure anger bringing to light just how easy it is for the “good” religious small town folk to become just as demented and vile. the single nastiest, most unforgiving western i’ve ever seen. there is no god here, at least not one you want to worship
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Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 1964
sincerely astonishing just how fuckin far great staging will take a movie. this is, down to the bone, The Peter Sellers Movie but i solidly believe George C Scott delivers the greatest line read of all time no less than forty times in this
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Marie Antoinette 2006
it’s amazing Jason Schwartzman didn’t become a costume drama staple after this, he has the perfect 1700s European face