Letterboxd — Your life in film

From the opening Warner Brothers logo, to its end credits, "Argo" is a fully-engrossing and remarkably accomplished piece of filmmaking. Director Ben Affleck assembles a film that pays attention to the smallest of details while delivering on a grand dramatic scale.

With both cinematography that adds a patina of grain to its naturalistic color palette and the film's immersive design details, the look of "Argo" is historically appropriate and eye-catching. The cast, led by a stoic Affleck and more-than-solid turns…

Considering its plot, where a man named Gil travels through time to consult with the great masters he idolizes on the book he is writing, Midnight in Paris should overflow with imagination and whimsey. Instead, the film and the characters in it just kind of stumble along.

The modern day set of characters — Gil's fiancee, her friends, and her parents — are detestable nasty people. The 1920s set of characters — the great artists, authors, and thinkers Woody Allen…

There's a scene at the end of the first act of THE ARTIST in which silent film star George Valentin says to newcomer Peppy Miller "If you want to be an actress, you have to have something that the other's don't" or something to that effect. He then proceeds to draw a birthmark on her face with an eye-liner. That fake birthmark later becomes Peppy's "something", that which separates her from the crowd and eventually makes her into a star.…

It's a monumental achievement and a huge demonstration of the diversity and range of Steven Soderbergh that he released this in the same year as Erin Brockovich. Not even a year after that standard and heartfelt piece, he unleashes this biting and ultra-real exploration into the drug war that plagues this nation. He removes all of the glitz and Hollywood sensationalism that typically fills up a film of this nature and instead shoots it up with a major sense of…

The other day, I asked my buddy @joehribar why Letterboxd has options to both rate and like a film. If someone gives a film anything above three-stars, wouldn't that mean they liked it? His response was a good one, "what if you can plainly see that a film is well-made, but don't like it personally?" He didn't say it out loud, but it was inferred: the opposite could be true as well.

Well, just five films into my Letterboxd career…

Astonishingly fresh, deft, weird and left-of-center, RANGO is a self-stylized 21st Century Western set in the world of desert-dwelling animals who think they're living in the world of Sergio Leone. Elegant motion-captured performances, bold and bizarre visual elements, stylish and tongue-firmly-stuck-in-bone-dry-cheek, RANGO is a film that isn't so much for modern animation fans as it's for fans who are sick of modern animation and its lowest-common-denominator-catering blandness.

Whimsical and witty with strong direction by Gore Verbinski (who seems to have…