jackkyser has written 55 reviews for films during 2022.
-
EO 2022
A film that really captures how strange human behavior must seem to animals. We’re given little context about the interactions between the human characters, allowing us to more or less experience everything from the titular donkey’s point of view. It’s a visually striking, rather meditative 90 minutes of cinema.
Like Spielberg’s War Horse, there’s one thing about EO that kept me at arm’s length - our protagonist is a live animal. As such, we’re following a passive character who is…
-
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood 2019
Logging this masterpiece not because I watched it again, but because I finally finished Tarantino’s novelization, which is a fantastic read. Chapter Twenty Three (The Drinkers’ Hall of Fame) features one of the best hang-out sequences Tarantino has ever written.
-
-
-
The Departed 2006
It's been 16 years since The Departed came out, and I was 16 years old at the time of its release. That means I've spent half my life replaying the events of this movie in my head, trying my best to imitate it, and watching it again and again with a big grin on my face. Thank you for sixteen years well spent, Marty!
-
Empire of Light 2022
A lovely ode to movie theaters! The film starts to go somewhere interesting with regard to the main character’s mental illness, but it doesn’t quite follow through on its early promise. But Deakins and the wondrous production design kept me mesmerized!
-
White Noise 2022
In my mind, White Noise is one of the major achievements of the year. I’ve read a lot of folks comparing it (unfavorably) to Inherent Vice, but that seems like a fairly broad and surface-level comparison between what are ultimately two pretty dissimilar adaptations of dense, “unfilmable” books. Plus, I loved Inherent Vice, so the comparison didn’t deter me in the least from eagerly anticipating White Noise.
If Noah Baumbach is out to conjure up a feeling of existential dread,…
-
-
-
Thief 1981
The Caan Film Festival (belatedly) continues with Michael Mann’s Thief!
I feel guilty for never having seen this movie in its entirety before, particularly given my Mann fandom. It’s not just the masterful Caan performance at the center of Thief - it’s the astonishing nighttime photography of slick Chicago streets and neon lights; the borderline abstract imagery in the safe-cracking scenes; the devastating portrait of a man’s idyllic future crumbling before his eyes; the utterly authentic depiction of an ex-con’s…
-
BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths 2022
It’s the first Iñárritu film in seven years, so I had to see it in cinemas (during the brief nanosecond in which Netflix allows its prestige films theatrical play). And what a cinematic feast! There are images in this movie that will stay with me for a long time. Yes, one could argue Iñárritu has lost the narrative thread a little bit with this one (individual scenes are more dramatically compelling than others), but the overall experience exists somewhere outside…
-
Gangs of New York 2002
This film is, as always, absolutely monumental. It's been almost twenty years since I saw Gangs of New York on its opening day in cinemas (Friday, December 20th, 2002 - I'll never forget it). I was a wide-eyed twelve-year-old experiencing something so exhilarating and enormous in scope that it made me fall even deeper in love with the medium of film.
How did this movie not win - at the very, very least - Academy Awards for Best Production Design…