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The first half-hour of The Nightingale is one of the most excruciatingly painful watches you're likely to experience. What's more, the film achieves that with no visual exploitation: Jennifer Kent's harrowing sound design will stay with you for a long time after watching. After the pivotal scene, I had to pause the film and step away from it for a while — I can't imagine how it would have been to…
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Some absolutely brilliant iconography here: the dreams with sword-fighting Jesus were hysterical, as was the Virgin Mary dildo. The film is provocative and critical of the Catholic Church in a way that reminds me of what Pasolini would have made if he were alive today.
However, I found some of the rape/sexploitation completely unnecessary and excessively male-gazey, especially when you consider that it hardly heightens the political points that the film is trying to make.
I travelled to Berlin only to see this. Tsai Ming-liang’s cinema has given so much to me that I thought it only fair to give something back. I was pressed by the desire to finally, for the first time, see one of his films on the big screen, and motivated by the confidence that none of his previous works had disappointed me. I was not expecting disappointment, but I was also not expecting this.
Funnily enough, despite the fact that…
Disclaimer: this is one of the longest pieces I’ve ever posted on Letterboxd, as it’s around 2600 words long. I’m not expecting many (if any) people to read all of it, but it was only fair to dedicate this amount of space to a project as long and complex as The Return. If you do decide to read it, I appreciate it, and I probably owe you one.
In the scene that opens the second season of Twin Peaks, special…
