Letterboxd — Your life in film

68/100

Second viewing, last seen during its U.S. theatrical release (which wasn't until 1997). This is top-tier cinematic maximalism, a mode that's always, at least in my cinephile lifetime, played a distant second fiddle—not even on the same concert stage, really—to its antithesis. Not really sure why it's so much less tiresome than Kusturica's subsequent films, though the three superb lead performances probably deserve much of the credit; I vaguely recall voting for Miki Manojlovic in that year's Skandies, but…

44/100

Very occasional reminder that you, too, can be instrumental in making me watch and review incredibly dumb movies like this one, which was suggested and voted upon by the surpassingly wonderful folks who keep me solvent at the moment via Patreon. (On top of the pandemic, I'm about to lose my primary source of professional writing income—until January, anyway—thanks to California's misguided AB5, which limits freelancers to a maximum of 35 pieces per annum for any publication.) My near-daily…

69/100

Second viewing, last seen just prior to its original theatrical release. Fascinating to watch at this moment in history, in a way that I didn't remotely anticipate: When Grenouille's reign of terror begins in Grasse, we get more or less exactly the personal safety vs. economic health debate that's currently raging in the U.S., with a few sensible folks advocating a curfew while numerous others complain that they'll be ruined if they can't work by night. Alan Rickman's Richis…

69/100

Second viewing, last seen 20 years ago. I jotted down a few notes, then reread what I wrote at the time; every note was accounted for, my opinion has not changed one iota. Still my favorite Iranian film that isn't actually Iranian in any respect.

My contemporaneous thoughts:
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Nothing like an obsessive quest to keep a story moving forward; I didn't read the production details outlined in the press kit, but I can guarandamntee you that nobody involved…

64/100

A.V. Club review. It's for Watch This, so I accentuated the positive (and I do quite like the film overall). By contrast, my drive-by from probably sometime around February of '98 mostly pushed back against contemporaneous raves:

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Wag the Dog (***) [JUN 2020: out of four stars], despite a brilliant premise and a first-rate cast, never quite takes off; like Maurizio Nichetti's The Icicle Thief, it's consistently clever but almost never funny. At the time, I remarked to…

69/100

[Originally written for Nerve.com.]

Some films — not necessarily the best ones — linger in the memory, expanding and transforming, nagging at you from afar. For months after the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, I couldn't stop thinking about Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl, a movie I'd more or less shrugged at immediately following its world premiere. Fleeting images recurred, unbidden, during moments of distraction. I found myself haunted by the film's inconclusive conclusion, in which Martel discreetly, empathetically turns…

65/100

[I posted the following on a message board at the time of the film's release. All misspellings and grammatical oddities were intentional; long story.]

There is some pretty kind of interesting stuff going on in this picture in my opinion. I am still trying to work out the racial subtext which is complicated in the many different ways not least by the casting of a black man as a raging bigot whose bigotry is at once upended and confirmed.…

51/100

Watched this hours after learning of Lynn Shelton's death—it was the only one of her eight features that I hadn't seen. (Couldn't fit it into my TIFF '14 schedule, and then mixed-to-negative reactions from friends scared me off.) It's also the only one she had no hand in writing/devising, which conveniently enables me to speak no ill of the dead while noting that the film's already highly uneven script pretty much plunges off a cliff around the end of…

58/100

Something snapped into place for me—rather belatedly—during The Nice Guys: I have trouble with broad comedies built around a convoluted detective story. Ask my brain to process anarchic and methodical at the same time and it belches smoke, I guess; maybe I get too wrapped up in following the plot to laugh. That would explain why I was twice bored out of my skull by Inherent Vice (to such an extent that I couldn't even think of anything to…