profile picture is by Brooke Condolora from the game "Burly Men at Sea".
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
Baby Face 1933
For a staunchly conservative Objectivist like Stanwyck, she really plays a fantastically subversive pre-code lead - one too layered to easily condemn but too vicious to easily praise. The fact that she's fueled by prior abuses made against her as well as explicit Nietzschean philosophies is especially wild, giving any moral lesson made by the film's conclusion more fascinating than it might have been had everything simply wrapped up without incident.
Baby Face remains one of the more explicit pre-code…
-
They Do Not Exist 1974
It's a little embarrassing approaching this film in the context of a far too late foreign reckoning (at least for those who have faced the consequences of their held positions - some seem to shield themselves by way of their own power) - apologies for sounding defeatist, but it can almost feel like a posthumous recognition of humanity that we normalized brushing aside for however many decades at this point. I must admit though, it felt a bit strange spending…
Popular reviews
More-
Mirror 1975
Tarkovsky is a bit different from other slow cinema artists that dominate other parts of the world. Like filmmakers such as Bela Tarr and Lav Diaz, Tarkovsky holds shots for long periods of time, perhaps with more camera movement than the others, yet when Tarr and Diaz move their shots, they match the mood out of necessity. Their films are slow, so their camera movements are slow as well, makes sense, and they do it spectacularly. Tarkovsky moves his camera…
-
Marketa Lazarová 1967
Sátántangó may be this film's only rival in terms of quality, yet they are near polar opposites, with Sátántangó achieving mood through slow, sprawling, dense story-telling, and Marketa Lazarová punching with every scene of action and dialogue; as flashy and bombastic as possible.
Of course this is all a personal perspective, but if I were to visualize a potential "peak" of film perfection, Sátántangó and Marketa Lazarová are the only films that seemed to attempt that jump. Neither film is…
