Letterboxd — Your life in film

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THE GLASS KEY is an early proto-noir about political corruption that is filled with plenty of adventure, strong performances and fairly layered characters. The titular metaphor refers to Veronica Lake's character Janet Henry, who is Ralph Henry's daughter. It is explained in one of the early scenes after she slaps the protagonist Paul Madvig. He says in awe: "I'm going to society. [Raph Henry has] practically given me the key to his house.", to which his right-hand man Ed…

For whatever reason, it seems like I’ve spent the last two months watching cynical movies of people doing nasty things to each other and not giving a damn about the world. Basically, nihilism. It’s redemptive of me perhaps, or about time, that I found a movie about people coming together to perform a heroic good deed.

In Thailand summer 2018, a soccer team leisurely went cave exploring when a monsoon flooded in and trapped them. Thirteen Lives is a cleanly…

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

— The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats

The Quiet Man is glorious artifice. It’s a Yeatsian RomCom set in the Platonic ideal of Ireland stocked with a complete set of Irish Stereotype trading cards. Barry Fitzgerald is the…

There are always glimmer of moments where Ruben Ostlund is comparable to the great Luis Buñuel. Take the opening scene where Ostlund is skewering male models and the egotism that has to come with it. The intelligence of the models varies, but they all try to assimilate for one purpose: To turn cynicism into optimism (the way it is visually conveyed, that begins to make relative sense). The TV interviewer has smarts, but uses them to appeal to the lowest…

Part of The Ocean Liner Project, formerly The Titanic Project

Yes they reduce all the young women to infantile sex objects within 15 minutes but the practical effects and the Winters-Borgnine-Hackman triumvirate give this disaster movie WEIGHT. Those three characters are archetypes rather than stereotypes, with Hackman especially good as the cleric and self-declared “renegade” whose muscular strain of Christianity stresses personal responsibility. Leslie Nielsen’s performance, meanwhile, proves once more that while he was great at sending up shallow and…

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Surprisingly interesting; this seems like a movie I should be bored at, but I simply wasn't. That is to say, I almost fell asleep after 30 minutes, something I wouldn't usually praise in a movie, but it really didn't act to the movie's detriment at all. It is like falling asleep on a sunny beach, a beautiful snooze. I didn't actually end up falling asleep, but after a while I started walking around the room and doing pushups. It…