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  Portrait of a Lady on Fire 2019

  Rewatched by Christine Jin 05 Sep 2019

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  What holds Sciamma’s first venture into period drama together is quite a universal theme: artmaking is lovemaking. The illicit desire between her women on screen finds expression in bold yet delicate brushwork and in gently flowing pencil lines. Placing a woman painter from 18th-century France in a secluded seaside mansion on a hill, a classic Gothic setting, the director quietly watches her conduct a covert investigation of the sort you often see in stories categorized as the “woman’s film.” Covert,…

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  A Question of Silence 1982

  ★★★½ Rewatched by Christine Jin 10 Jul 2019

  Housewife, secretary, and waitress—three very ordinary, previously unacquainted white Dutchwomen brutally murder a male boutique owner together, with no apparent motive. It outrages society, and the outrage poses a mystery that must be solved to reassure a confused public with some sort of explanation because, apparently, no sane woman is possibly capable of such a crime. The investigation begins as another white Dutchwoman, a court psychiatrist, gets tasked with determining the killers’ (in)sanity, thereby becoming a surrogate for us the…

Popular reviews

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  Inside Llewyn Davis 2013

  ★★★★ Rewatched by Christine Jin 30 Jan 2014

  wrote a review for the missing slate.

  Equal parts a dense character study and a soft-toned portrayal of the 1960s folk music scene, the Coen brothers’ latest film has a modest but indelible moment a little past the hour mark, in which the protagonist Llewyn Davis trudges through the snow and clutches his worn-out corduroy jacket tight against a winter gust just when his foot slips in a slush puddle. It’s soon followed by an equally unforgettable close-up of the…

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  Spotlight 2015

  ★★★½ Watched by Christine Jin 27 Nov 2015

  It seems McCarthy decided (and quite expectedly so) the kind of exposé storytelling like this would thrive on anonymity in characterization, and stylistic decisions that go along with it: hence the movie, minus the prologue, that begins and ends with a group shot, with a deliberately monotonous pattern of interior group and medium shots, and a few suitably ominous landscapes. It's as though emotional impact should only be derived from investigative revelations, instead of having viewers engage with the characters…