Charlotte Vale transitioning from repressed younger sibling to slutty aunt— relatable and inspiring.
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High Flying Bird 2019
There is not a single prestige TV drama whose ground could not be covered better by Soderbergh, an iPhone, and less than 2 hours running time.
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To All the Boys I've Loved Before 2018
To All the Boys Who Started Ghosting Me Literally The Day After We Watched This Movie On A Third Date
(sorry if I'm clogging anyone's feed, I want to reconnect with people on Letterboxd again and I'm enjoying the nostalgia of putting all the unlogged films in my diary)
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Wild Rose 2018
I've been a bit quiet about it, partly because I don't have Wi-fi right now, partly because I haven't gotten around to using this site properly in months. But I was at the London Film Festival again this year, and I've written a few reviews/longer pieces on the bits that stood out to me. Here's the first, my review of arguably the best Star being Born you'll see all year (or next year, maybe, you know how festivals be).
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Cold War 2018
'Pawlikowski is a serious filmmaker who doesn’t make the mistake of thinking that history happens in widescreen. History never makes itself well known to the people living through it; quite often it feels more like a movie than real life. The scope of his two most recent stories, both dealing with post-war Poland’s past and future, is at once suffocatingly narrow and devastatingly wide, protracted to excess, even in the space of his less than 90 minute running times. Everything…
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Apostasy 2017
'In the opening scene, Alex talks to a sympathetic nurse who tries to get her to give secret permission for the procedure. Not such a hypothetical when dealing with an anaemic patient, who may need emergency help at any time. What is hypothetical is that the scene occasionally cuts to a too-tight close-up on Alex’s face, talking to God as if she is alone in the room. This unusual approach to film grammar is an absolute coup; firstly, because it…
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McQueen 2018
Feels mis-guided, because quite a few of the talking heads, who have a lot of insightful things to say, too quickly veer into the tortured genius narrative (for a good refutation of which, except re: Van Gogh instead, see Hannah Gadsby's Nanette), and the film indulges them in doing so. Maybe that's what really happened to McQueen— fame and depression eroded away all his rough edges, his wit and his warmth and left only the dullest, darkest side— but judging…
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The Piano 1993
Has some of the bawdy, bathetic, mundane and dreamy humour that I love from PTA films like Phantom Thread, similarly without compromising the committed passion of its perspective. It's like Zama (the beach-bound poster of which is maybe a deliberate homage, given the shared themes?). Now I feel like I should rewatch and maybe reappraise Zama, a film that I was irritable and maybe impatient towards.
I like it when the director changes their original ending (Ada was meant to…
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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom 2018
In its sci-fi/gothic horror mash-up, comes surprisingly close in theme and aesthetic to what Ridley Scott has been doing recently with the Alien franchise, except the characters are even dumber and the dream logic plotting even messier. It's just a shame that there's no signs of greatness I can point to and predict Fallen Kingdom's inevitable critical rehabilitation. At least the scares work, and are connected to something I feel strongly about, unlike, say, A Quiet Place (amazing what a…
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A Time to Love and a Time to Die 1958
A strange film with an intoxicating sense of creeping familiarity, the smell of acid rain on asphalt. It's ostensibly about the gradual disillusionment, and small rebellion, of a Nazi soldier during wartime— a fantasy that must have had some significance for Sirk, given that his estranged Nazi son died fighting the Russians. Though it's shot on location and on studio sets in West Germany, the main character, who spends most of his time on leave in his home town, is…