Letterboxd — Your life in film

Of all of last year’s films I didn’t get to see during their initial release, Compliance was among those I most lamented missing. Its premise was pure, ludicrous pulp – things spiral horribly out of control when a prank caller posing as a cop convinces a restaurant manager to detain and strip-search an employee – yet it was said to be more of an understated indie drama than a gimmicky Hollywood thriller, and the critics loved it. And of course,…

When it appeared in 2007, Paranormal Activity was arguably the best entry in the “found footage” horror sub-genre since that category was kickstarted by the immense success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999. A sort of Blair Witch for the YouTube era, Paranormal Activity capitalized on social media’s self-surveillance culture and applied it to things that go bump in the night, telling the story of a young couple who decided to investigate their home’s strange nocturnal occurrences by setting…

Horror director Ti West is known for employing a persistent, slow-burning tension in his films, which I admire in principle, but in practice it hasn’t always worked out. His last feature, House of the Devil, was defined by tension built around what we knew and the protagonist didn’t: her babysitting clients were extremely unsavory characters. How it would end was unclear, but there was no question that she would be subjected to a harrowing ordeal before it did, and the…

To begin with, I have no small amount of reverence for Roger Corman. Untold hours of my youth were spent in front of a 13″ television that screened the most outrageous low-budget horror movies my local video store had to offer. Aside from the cheap thrills provided, there was something inspiring about their scrappy production values: a sense that limited resources and skills need not obstruct one’s dreams, and that a creative endeavor’s ostensible shortcomings could make it that much…

I’ve been following Mike Birbiglia’s work for a few years now, which means I’ve heard this story several times before. Sleepwalk With Me had its origins in his stand-up act, which morphed into a one-man show, which became a book, which has now been adapted into a film. It’s a good story deserving of all these media, but it is still best told onstage with a microphone.

Birbiglia is a gifted storyteller, heartfelt and free of cynicism, and the chops…

Apropos of nothing, I’ve decided to watch all of Disney’s theatrical animated features in order of release date. Since Wreck-It Ralph’s release in November will bring the grand total up to fifty-two, it will take me exactly one year to watch them all if I do one film per week.

The marathon began tonight with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a film of such tremendous historical significance that it’s almost impossible to judge it solely on its own…

There’s a good story in here somewhere, but unfortunately this documentary about former Hole drummer Patty Schemel doesn’t seem to have much faith that it can reach very far outside Hole’s fan base. A lot of narrative polish it might have employed for the sake of the rest of us is eschewed in favor of making sure the fans get to hear about every last moment behind the scenes (and making damned sure everyone knows Schemel spent a lot of…

Though he occasionally rises above it, Wes Anderson’s real great talent is in actively, counter-intuitively preventing an emotional connection between character and audience. I have never seen anyone work so hard to undermine his own ostensible goals. In spite of the delight his twee aesthetic elicits from his fan base, Anderson’s characters tend to be lifeless props populating meticulously constructed dioramas which were designed to be admired from the outside.

If being emotionally impenetrable truly is what he’s after, Moonrise…

In the late 1980s, two recent college graduates in San Francisco began making audio recordings of their elderly neighbors’ loud, drunken arguments, eventually amassing over fourteen hours of material. If you find that material fails to transcend momentary amusement, the ensuing story will follow suit. As the recordings become a phenomenon throughout underground tape-trading networks and spawn albums, comic books, theatrical productions, and feature films, the cult obsession over such a mundane artifact grows ever more puzzling. And when salient…