Letterboxd — Your life in film

I've only just gotten into TNG and sporadically watched TOS, so I'm not a die-hard at all, but this is so far from what Star Trek is it is truly repulsive. "I thought we were explorers," Scotty protests right around the time I thought the same thing, but the idealism of Gene Roddenberry is unfashionable, so instead we get slick cynicism and an utter lack of consequences. To begin the film with a casual violation of the Prime Directive that…

Watching Gray's films from most recent to oldest, I see a curious trend: each new film becomes more polished and the social and human scale expands (even Two Lovers, his smallest film, has a vastness underneath its intimacy), yet the work gets more operatic in reverse. Little Odessa is aesthetically rawer than any of Gray's other films, yet it aims for the rafters of classical epics, playing its small story of Russian-Jewish heritage and sins of the father for Visconti/Coppola/Cimino-level…

I don't see how anyone walks away from this thinking it justifies torture, but there's still something off-putting about that final image, with all its "Was it worth it?" properties. It frames the waste and rot of the War on Terror as a measure of what we lost in terms of our true selves, as opposed to taking stock of the astonishing collateral damage we amassed just to kill one man. (A far more appropriate closing would've been the last…

Golden hues turn flat-out angelic when they light up Johansson, though they also project a shadow behind her that looks like the outline of those too close to ground zero of a nuclear strike. The son of a Kraut immigrant knows before his superior officers come to him to fix an exhibition match that he has to use to his all-American partner and friend. That same man feels an empathy for the people of color terrorized by a local killer,…

Runtime said 2hr15, but from start to the beginning of the credits seemed to take less than two hours. A nice cut down from some of the bloat lately, and Black makes every second count with a trilogy's worth of arc crammed into one movie. The dialogue regains some of the spryness of the original's improv after IM2 tried to replicate RDJ's natural fit with off-puttingly artificial results, but the real pleasure lies simply in watching Stark solve problems. The…

Opens with such a nasty streak I almost wanted to retroactively tell my editor my screener deleted itself after 10 minutes, yet weirdly it brightens considerably after the dull Birmingham couple get down to murdering. The simple meanness of the start gains an actual foothold of perspective that gives the lines some kind of viewpoint, at which point the film really does become frequently, grimly hilarious. I still need to see KILL LIST, but the kitchen sink direction, interspersed with…

A true epic, attuned to the superhuman level of a myth (Arthur isn't merely the king of England, he IS England) but also moored to the grisliness of heroic tales built on the bodies of the conquered in a way few large-scale properties have even attempted. Game of Thrones comes to mind, but it often feels self-consciously "real" compared to the more confident balance of the fantastical with the repugnant. Boorman reminds the viewer of the lust and violence upon…

I don't know that I've ever seen a film so carefully packed with details that would probably give me nothing for exploring them further. Yet there's also a strange intimacy and prophecy to the film, its apocalyptic vision of a country dessicated by the Hydra of televangelist fundamentalism and empty capitalism timely for its contemporary release and no less so now. "There's fuckin' room to move as a fry cook" is a perfect summary for the twisted, backwards career possibilities…

The first 20 minutes are jaw-droppingly beautiful, cutting between innocuous business dealings and the careful execution of an art heist that makes the crowded realms of executive rooms seem more chaotic, making Thomas Crown seem caged-in until he takes his rightful place in the scene of a challenge. The breezy, jazzy tone carries through Crown's subsequent pas de deux with the insurance investigator who presents him with "a worthy adversary." The final stretch's melancholic slow-down feels a bit too much…