Letterboxd — Your life in film

I feel like I may well be judging Seven Psycopaths slightly harshly, simply for not being In Bruges.

It this hadn't been the follow-up to that film I would have simply loved it, flaws and all, and accept it as the very enjoyable postmodern caper that is undoubtedly is; and I do love me a good postmodern caper.

It's a film about either life imitating art, or the manipulation of life to to stimulate artistic creation. It also acknowledges the…

In all honesty I'm unsure whether the rating I've given here is how I really feel about this - I could go either way.

It's either a brilliant critique on the nature of our vaccuous, ADHD-riddled culture, through the medium of a vaccuous, ADHD-riddled mess of a film, or it is simply a vaccuous, ADHD-riddled mess of a film.

Joseph Kahn lobs just about every teen slasher movie cliche in, along with bits of alien invasion and time travel into…

Part of a Bergman Odyssey

One gets the feeling Bergman was having fun, despite it being rather a bleak film featuring some incredible emotional cruelty. He manages to impose several of his preoccupations onto what is at first glance, a simple chamber piece, in the vein of one of Bergman's heroes, August Strindberg.

Not unsually in his career, there is the bringing of theatrical convention to the filmic medium:
The film opens with a monologue delivered directly to the audience…

Part of a Bergman Odyssey

This review is of the theatrical version. Unlike Fanny and Alexander though, which I aim to see in its unabridged form as soon as possible, I don't feel in a hurry to see the full version of Scenes from a Marriage

It's not that it isn't an astonishing piece of work - a stripped-bare look at the marriage of Johan and Marianne (Erland josephson and Liv Ullman), it manages to be paradoxically forensic in its…

'When I was young, I asked my priest
how you could get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to his children.

"You are sheep among wolves, be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves."'

Sweet Jesus, Mr. Affleck. Were you just lulling us all into a false sense of scornful security?

Isn't it always slightly galling when someone you've completely written off produces something great? That's what…

In an unusual move, here comes a revenge drama from South Korea...

I don't what they put in the water down there but it seems like someone will hatch a operatically convuluted payback against you if you cut them up at a traffic light. However, I'm not going to complain about the proliferation when they all seem to be good to excellent in the quality stakes; and The Man From Nowhere is no exception.

The clever part of Lee Jeong-beom's…

It's always better to take a good few steps back after watching something as thematically rich and elliptical as Paul Thomas Anderson's latest. Take a take breath, go and do something else and let it seep into your subconscious.

It’s a stately, lumbering beast of a movie, and utterly unrepentant about it. It must have been a hard sell to studio execs. A two-and-a-half hour epic about a cult that’s obviously inspired by Scientology (bit controversial with all the high-profile…

This is one of the neatest little concepts for a horror movie I've seen in quite a while, and the Soska sisters have done a sterling job in making it look really slick on a very modest budget. Unfortunately there are a few too many glaring flaws that force me to acknowledge that it isn't a classic (although I suspect it will garner a certain cult following), despite the immense goodwill I feel towards it.

Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle) is…

After the glowing reviews, I was looking forward to this. Sam Mendes and a really stellar cast; what could go wrong?

The answer is really, not all that much, but I don't think it's the magnificent return to form it's been hailed as after the turgid mess that was Quantum of Solace.

It certainly starts well; the opening scene is a great extended action sequence featuring Craig and Naomi Harris trashing half of Istanbul in pursuit of Ola Rapace's mercenary…

Jaw-dropping in several respects, Bart Layton's documentary is as technically skilled as it audacious and unbelievable.

In 1994, 13 year-old Nicholas Barclay went missing from his home in San Antonio, Texas. In 1997 a young man claiming to be him appears in a town in Spain. His family welcome him back into the fold despite his complete lack of resemblance to the missing boy.

We know right from the beginning that the boy is not Nicholas. He is Frédéric Bourdin,…

Neat little Icelandic comedy, with strange Oedipal undertones.
Hlynur (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) is a feckless layabout, still living at home with his mother Berglind (Hanna María Karlsdóttir) in a cluttered flat, complete with sofa-bath (yes, really).

In the manner of such movies, this arrangement is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Lola Milagros (Victoria Abril), a Spanish flamenco teacher who is revealed to be Berglind's lover, but not before she and Hlynur share a drunken evening together.

It's fairly…