Letterboxd — Your life in film

Sir Ridley is on fire this year!

Some may fault House of Gucci for not going all-in on its soap opera-y potential, but Scott knows the narrative is strong enough without such flourishes. That being said, House of Gucci is still quite a bit of fun, with each actor clearly relishing the opportunity to go big (Jared Leto is basically a cartoon in this movie, and I mean that as a compliment). Adam Driver and Al Pacino bring emotional gravitas…

Really engrossing and infuriating material.

Dopesick also showed me something I hadn’t seen before - an addict (Michael Keaton) in rehab genuinely nervous that the program won’t work, that he’ll get out and just start using again. He sees how many of these addicts are there for their third or fourth time, and it makes him antsy - and his eventual relapse feels almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. He’s given permission, in a sense, to start using again - because…

It’s amazing how one can remember spatial geography in a film. I had such a strong sense memory of the scene in which Gosling uncovers the wooden horse in the orphanage - I could recall the exact location of the furnace almost too well. It was as if the memory had been... implanted. Yes, this film is about that very thing - the precise nature of our memories, and the certainty that we've lived and experienced things. But have we?…

20th Century Studios and Locksmith Animation’s Ron’s Gone Wrong is a pleasant, diverting family film that’s almost entirely about smartphone culture. If this movie had been released twenty years ago, it’d absolutely mystify everyone on planet Earth – and even now, I wonder how someone who has never owned a smartphone would react to it. I don’t mean to indicate that Ron’s Gone Wrong endorses living one’s life in front of a screen – in fact, it’s a pretty direct…

A second viewing really added to the experience on this one. The first time around, I was startled and disturbed by the film's excellent depiction of London's seedy underbelly, particularly in a mid-movie sequence that cuts beneath the glamour of the dance floor and puts the full ugliness of this world on display.

I was less certain on first viewing exactly where Wright was taking us, at least for the film's first half. Watching it again, I delighted in picking…

Haynes offers a characteristically unconventional and impressionistic portrait of this one-of-a-kind band and the surrounding New York art scene of the 1960s. Prepare to be overwhelmed by the staggering amount of overlapping archival footage from the premier musicians, filmmakers and poets of the era, which fuse together into more of a tone poem than a documentary. But that’s the point - just as with I’m Not There, Haynes knows the form of his film should reflect the spirit of its…

Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch is the only movie I can recall that’s structured in the form of a literary magazine (complete with an opening obituary, an on-the-town briefing by a cycling Owen Wilson, and three feature stories from noted Dispatch journalists). Heck, there's even a cartoon section near the end of the film. Above all, this is a moving love letter to a ragtag team of expatriates who have found a home abroad in Ennui-sur-Blasé, France - far away…