I'm a boring purist but a flexible one. I write more about film at CelluloidDimension.com
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Cobweb 2023
My incredulity towards the conventions of the genre probably played a role in keeping me from thoroughly enjoying this patchwork of new and old ideas. Although I was naturally skeptical of its didactic sobriety, I must admit that I unapologetically embraced the campy bravado that devoured the dramatic passivity of the plot in its delirious final acts. Samuel Bodin's Cobweb is deceptive, deliberately deceptive - what seems to start out as a supernatural horror story is really just the camouflage…
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The Other 1972
Impressively clumsy. Apparently, it only takes 10 minutes into the plot to predict the entire movie. There are two plot twists, one is more functional than the other, but both are equally arbitrary. It's not that the film doesn't take the right steps to psychologically manipulate its audience, it's that its filmmaking system has no tactics whatsoever to cope with the gargantuan tragic proportions of the solemn story. When we meet the two child twins we never see them in…
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Written on the Wind 1956
Perfectly paced, masterfully acted, unerring narrative structure, preposterously melodramatic, terrifying and aesthetically handsome film with a hyperactive temperament. The decadence of American high society has never looked so sharp and perilously tragic as in this absolute masterpiece by the most sentimental of all filmmakers, Douglas Sirk. Fascinatingly this film brings together all the classic ingredients to morph into a lush, full-length epic, yet Douglas Sirk only needs just over an hour and a half to dynamite fatalism and voluptuous romanticism…
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Holy Motors 2012
An inexhaustible challenge and attack on the meaning of cinema within the desensitization of the digital age of filmmaking, it finds artistic possibilities by mutating the insipidly empty into the true purity that the medium of film represents. A philosophical passage through life and the fundamental role of cinema in our existence, it is a delightful piece of criticism that never feels heavily irritating, containing inscrutable sequences worthy of obsessive attention to discover the abundant creativity and vitality that the…
