Amazing that a movie this deeply interested in the processes of policing is this deeply jaded with the system of policing. That final shot contextualizes the moral compromise of Bullitt's entire career in such a quietly damning way that it erodes the (tenuous at best) cool factor of his character.
Bullitt the movie is cool because it so perfectly encapsulates everything good about the world of art it was released in. This is a movie of tense, methodical chases in…
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Bullitt 1968
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A Fistful of Dollars 1964
At it's best when Leone is pulling the least from Yojimbo, especially in regards to setpieces.
One can only begin to imagine the leviathan impact that the final scene of this film had on popular culture, but it's most interesting to me because it's the most individualistic filmmaking of the whole piece. Life or death, riding on a dime, reducing geography to the liminal world of close ups, human life solely to what our eyes can express. Kurosawa could never…
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Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band : Hammersmith Odeon, London '75 2005
It's staggering just how electric these songs are, how perfect these musicians are, and how fucking scruffy Bruce is!
Far from a perfect concert film, but maybe the best concert ever put to film - the version of She's the One here might be the most energizing thing I will ever watch.
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BlackBerry 2023
Thankfully operates less in the mode of "we really made a movie about BlackBerry 🤪" than in the mode of "we just made a movie about the banality of late stage capitalism and inherent inhumanity of wringing every possible penny out of your time on earth at the expense of all those around you"
Especially fascinating in contrast to Air, the unbridled pride that Affleck takes in maverick capitalism and it's cultural cachet totally opposed by how deeply cynical Matt…
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In the Mouth of Madness 1994
A carnivalesque romp through horror staples whose inwards momentum makes a spectacle of it's own existence. John Carpenter embraces metatext, and in doing so creates one of the most unhinged works of studio film.
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Ponniyin Selvan: Part II 2023
Galvanizing cinema for countless reasons, but perhaps most importantly the emotiveness of Ratnam's camera. Epics simply aren't made with this level of intimacy - handheld, wide angle, experiential lenses peering not just into history but into humanity, every bombastic setpiece and even more bombastic moment of political chamber drama cutting to a profoundly affecting core
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The Quick and the Dead 1995
One of cinema's greatest visual storytellers gives in fully to visual narrative, embracing the most barren pillars of genre and narrative and fleshing out this dusty corner of the world with such earnest vivacity that it becomes impossible to deny the legendary mythos with which Raimi envisions the Western.
This also arguably does for the West what Evil Dead did for horror, or Spider-Man for superheroes (hyperactive form re-contextualizing how these genre pieces can even be made as works of…
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Resident Evil: The Final Chapter 2016
Embracing kinetic action and frantic emotion, The Final Chapter's stylistic heel turn makes as profound a statement on metatext as the remix-reels of Retribution does. Clones and shambling undead populate a barren hellscape, monoliths of the old world (and series iconography) husks in the wake of time. A world where Resident Evil movies can exist in this way is on the way out, this mode of filmmaking (auteurist "B-movies" and individual star vehicles) scarcely able to sustain themselves even with…
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Resident Evil: Retribution 2012
Leans into every possible extreme (the artifice of digital film, the intensity and staple tropes of the action genre, the intermediated nature of what Resident Evil even is, etc...) and comes out the other side with perhaps the most essential action movie of the 21st century. Cinema is Milla going guns blazing at an army of zombies in a simulacra of Resident Evil, and Retribution a gesamtkunstwerk that takes with it all of film into what quite possibly is the most dynamic, entertaining form yet accomplished.
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John Wick: Chapter 4 2023
In which John Wick reaches its ultimate, most self-indulgent form by fully embracing heroic bloodshed