José Luis Cuerda's Butterfly (properly translated as The Butterfly's Tongue) is an interesting project at first glance: a coming-of-age tale with a rich historical backdrop, and not dissimilar to a cross between Fellini's Amarcord and Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, which is often named the greatest of all Spanish films.

It's too bad Cuerda treats his classic coming-of-age with the trite sentimentality that passed for humanism in many popular films of the '90s, a decade that celebrated the…

“The restlessness approached hysteria. The parties were bigger. The pace was faster, the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper.” The characters in The Great Gatsby speak with this breathless whimsicality, in dizzying spirals of pomp and circumstance that threaten to topple into their own absurdity. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal classic is a robust, vibrant portrait of the nouveau riche on Long Island in the Roaring ‘20s, a fable of doomed…

I was wrong about this film. So terribly, terribly wrong.

Never before has my opinion performed such a grand 180 on rewatch. When I first saw The Tree of Life it was a year and a half ago. I was a younger cinephile then, and this was perhaps the first truly abstract film I had seen. I left with a mixture of confusion, boredom, and repressed admiration.

Looking over my original review - which thankfully never hit Letterboxd - I…

It begins with the voice over of a dead man. If you recall, Billy Wilder’s black comic masterpiece Sunset Blvd. also begins with narration courtesy of a corpse. Like William Holden and Gloria Swanson in American Beauty‘s cinematic ancestor, the film finds the flailing suburban bore Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) dangerously mismatched with the manic energy of his ambitious but quickly aging wife Carolyn (Annette Bening). As we’ve been told, their marriage will lead to murder, but we realize that…