There are good things to say about Life of the Party. There are things in Life of the Party that I liked. Another film released earlier this year, Kay Cannon's Blockers, is similar in a lot of ways and has faults of its own, but those faults are forgiven by its strange sense of humor and refusal to allow any degree of normality in its storytelling or characters. Everybody in Blockers is part of the joke, and nobody serves only…

Its issues have been made clear to those more or less interested in these films, and you've read how its awareness of its own issues don't forgive those issues from being genuine excuses. Alongside that, its humor doesn't always land, and its murders have grown so vicious that at a point it stops feeling satisfying and starts becoming oddly confrontational, disturbing even. For a film that can be a lot of fun, its mindless violence turns into something more morbid…

Tarkovsky is a bit different from other slow cinema artists that dominate other parts of the world. Like filmmakers such as Bela Tarr and Lav Diaz, Tarkovsky holds shots for long periods of time, perhaps with more camera movement than the others, yet when Tarr and Diaz move their shots, they match the mood out of necessity. Their films are slow, so their camera movements are slow as well, makes sense, and they do it spectacularly. Tarkovsky moves his camera…

Sátántangó may be this film's only rival in terms of quality, yet they are near polar opposites, with Sátántangó achieving mood through slow, sprawling, dense story-telling, and Marketa Lazarová punching with every scene of action and dialogue; as flashy and bombastic as possible.

Of course this is all a personal perspective, but if I were to visualize a potential "peak" of film perfection, Sátántangó and Marketa Lazarová are the only films that seemed to attempt that jump. Neither film is…