Letterboxd — Your life in film

How can words do this thing justice? As metaphor it's just about the most harrowing critique of totalitarianism posing as religion posing as ritual I can imagine. Towering images, some seen and others implied/felt: blankets and mounds of white/salt, endlessly numbing horizon lines, and undercurrents of rot. Tears hydrate the soul, but deny any true understanding of the bigger picture, i.e. the suffering/delusion of many for the comfort of few. There is no parting this red sea.

Pans to the left and right of faded memories, recreating forgotten frames with old technologies (8mm) to make them vital again. But the newly refurbished memories are just as jagged, incomplete, and melancholic as the old ones. Polley is using the docu/fiction hybrid to create a never-ending dance between perspectives, judgments, realizations, personalities, and genres, each and every one competing with the other in perfect harmony. In essence, the closest the Cinema can come to representing the tangled limbs of a family tree.

Quietly devastating melodrama of small betrayals, tainted relationships, and possibilities lost. As the world falls apart offscreen, a family slowly self-destructs onscreen. An angry belief in God remains during this process even as faith dissolves almost entirely. Dead or alive, we are all floating vessels gliding calmly toward our inevitable end.

David Lynch, please meet Carlos Reygadas.

Worst casting decision ever.

Glorious horizons and layered long shots. Spaces stacked upon spaces, destruction living in tandem with peace. Truly another Earth. False boundaries and flimsy barriers can't keep the present from careening into both the past and future. Really a beautifully crafted film that goes out of its way to bungle momentum with plot/narrative/emotional gravitas.

It's not you IRON MAN THREE, it's me. I can see your charms and craft but I don't find your bloated and loud ilk very interesting at the moment. You belong to the realm of cinema instantly forgotten.

I always enjoy a pure genre romp. Alive with the sound of whip smart banter.

Words spoken and deeply felt. Dialogue is a powerful propeller spinning so furiously that each scene becomes a whirlpool of subtext sucking the audience deeper into these characters lives and traumas and prejudices and heartbreaks. The serpentine nature of the prose matches the slithering camera and gyrating skin, tracing the steps, tears, glances, judgements (and bellies) of a French-Arab family that is as fruitful as it is self-destructive. Their world is so circular, a form of super-realism bound by the rhythm of people listening and waiting for the drama that is already seeping into the seams of each frame.

My new favorite children's film. Really a stunning, layered, emotionally resonant piece of work.