Favorite films

Recent activity

• 

  ★★★★½

• 

  ★★★½

• 

  ★★★

• 

  ★★★½

Pinned reviews

• 

  Me and My Sister 2004

  ★★★★ Rewatched by vee 27 Nov 2021

  Perhaps even more devastating on rewatch because you already know where it's going to end up emotionally. In my previous review, I compared it to Margot at the Wedding and stated that I thought that MATW was the more biting version of this film. On rewatch, I'm not sure if that's true. Sure, MATW is definitely more acrid in tone (and probably the better film overall), the contrast in Les Soeurs Fachees between Frot and Huppert is so severe that…

• 

  Malina 1991

  ★★★★½ Watched by vee 24 Aug 2021

  "I'm not Christ. I can't save you."
  "But you look like him."

  Malina takes everything that was bubbling under the surface in The Piano Teacher and finally lets it erupt on screen: despair, denial, auto-destruction. The film isn't really about anything other than our unnamed protagonist, despite everything else going on. It's a lurid and suffocating perspective, made more arresting by Schreoter's compositions (formal enough to seem deliberate, restrained enough to seem uncanny). Huppert seems to be acting in a…

Recent reviews

• 

  Death Watch 1980

  ★★★★½ Watched by vee 10 Aug 2022

  “I like watching it because it makes me cry.”

  A film less about the commodity of death and moreso about the commodity of humiliation. Pre-24 hours news cycle and definitely  pre-reality television, Death Watch manages to capture what is enthralling about real tragedy, no matter how sordid. I know Tavernier’s style isn’t for everyone, but I like how much space he gives the audience to make their assumptions before subverting them in small, but impactful ways.

• 

  Bad Lieutenant 1992

  ★★★½ Watched by vee 08 Aug 2022

  Uncouth Gems

Popular reviews

• 

  The Piano Teacher 2001

  ★★★★½ Watched by vee 13 Jul 2021 2

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

  It’s obvious the movie wants to alienate the audience from Erika, it wants them to gape in awe at her self mutilation, her perversion, her callousness. When she reveals her letter, and her true intentions, it seems as if the movie is begging the audience for their surface level disgust. At this point, I wasn’t sure where the film was exactly going. I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do with Erika, because it didn’t really seem like the…

• 

  The Lost Daughter 2021

  ★★★★½ Watched by vee 31 Dec 2021

  The Lost Daughter grapples with something that I've been thinking about for a while. There's a terrible mother trope involving women who are outright mean; directly punishing and verbally vindictive. And then there's the other type of cruel mother, one that's not often explored in film, and that is the mother who explicitly withholds comfort. These are not necessarily "cold" mothers, women who are repressed and emotionally detached from all their relationships, but rather women who see their children suffering…