Letterboxd — Your life in film

41/100

Your standard Korean weepy melodrama, this time playing to the ultimate Korean male fantasy (I'm told): the return of the first love, possibly to rekindle the old flame. The movie crosscuts between the two timelines, without much in the way of artful contrasts, and it is ultimately all for nought because the only obstacle the protagonist faces is one of his own chickenshit nature, and the thing that rips the young lovers apart is another one of those contrived…

Thanks to the Dardennes for making a superficially similar film about a young delinquent, so I can try to figure out why I don't respond so much to Meier's (perfectly adequate) movies - and the answer, I suspect, may be that she favours flashy concepts (like the house in Home, or the twist here, or the symbolic ending or e.g. the sudden cut to the 'siblings' fighting) in mundane settings, whereas the Dardennes hard-wire the strangeness within their characters; the…

- Ed Norton fits in perfectly with the Anderson universe.
- Once again, awesome soundtrack.
- Love how Tilda Swinton's cold character has no name, just Social Services.
- There is a scene where Captain Sharp and Sam have an exchange and Sam asks him if he's every been in love, to which Sharp replies "yes." Sam follows that up with "what happened" and he responds simply "she didn't love me back." When you think about it, most problems we…

The great cinematic pleasure of 2012 for me is undoubtedly discovering the films of Chang-dong Lee. I feel rather stupid for not exploring his work sooner but at least this way I get to experience a concentrated dose of movie magic.

Peppermint Candy chronicles the corruption and loss of innocence of a man during a turbulent and destructive period in South Korean history. Beginning with his suicide on a train track (a reoccurring motif helping to tie the film together)…

This is my first viewing since the film’s original release back in 2007 and I feel incredibly foolish for not having re-watched it sooner.

Quite simply The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a work of staggering brilliance and arguably the finest Western of the last twenty years. It is a film that exists on the border of two worlds - on one side it mythologizes the transitionary period of American history via the fable-building narration…

Passenger trains rumble through a meticulously framed shot—deep focused—revealing narrow streets, intimate, communal living quarters and the most restrained and subtle moments of family pathos. A patient camera squats on dry tatami, waiting for the story to unfold and it does, in its own time.

Yasujirō Ozu is the master’s undisputed master. In Tokyo Twilight, elements of film noir are suspended in the aspic of mono no aware, revealing a sentimental, distinctly Japanese, postwar realism. This is his darkest film…