Arnold's best work even if that is a low bar to clear.
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Deception 2021
It's been at least two years since I wrote regularly for Letterboxd. Back then, my primary interests were in formal qualities and structures, in particular the ways that those qualities/structures illuminate or mask the forces of production behind the film in terms of literal labour.
In the past two years, my interests have strayed far more toward the literary, the adaptive, the ethical, even if I still largely enjoy accessing these ideas through the framework of visual fireworks and structural…
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Breaker Morant 1980
I didn't love this film overall but that 180-degree rule-break in the opening monologue is fire.
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Dark Glasses 2022
The first half is an articulate, brilliant film that plays like an MTV Greatest Hits rendition of Argento's early career. Later it devolves a little into a slightly gutless and overly rigid dreamscape, which both serves the ideas of the film well and diminishes the overall affectual experience.
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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness 2022
The film itself is never particularly entertaining, but it is a Real Sam Raimi Horror Movie through-and-through, with Real Sam Raimi Horror Movie things on its mind, including the question 'what would happen if witches and warlocks had no idea how to express love so transmitted their feelings exclusively into corpses, alternate selves and hexes, and how would those alternate selves and hexes manifest as bodily ailments, and how would those bodily ailments manifest across multiple possible hauntologies?' So, yeah,…
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Happy End 2017
I missed this Haneke when it came out, largely as a result of the lukewarm reactions at the time, which perhaps I should have paid no attention to. Haneke is as nihilistic and comprehensive a surveyor as ever, though it is admittedly a little strange to watch him work so domestically. If the rest of his domestic films operate within the firm conditions of genre trappings (yes, even Amour and Caché, this one is a lot more corrosively established -…
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Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood 2022
Even if he was asleep, he'll think he's seen it all - yep, everything Linklater does best is here, history so minimised that it can be embodied almost entirely in one person's (imagined) version of the menial and everyday. The film works very hard to counterpoint Stan/America's fantasy with alternate perspectives even if it never settles on them, which is of course the most unsettling thing Linklater could do - to remain invested in the mythic whilst in a process of complete examination.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022
Entertaining in the moment and overall an interesting case study in the fact that there are no stakes in a text wherein literally anything can happen.
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The Batman 2022
Some of the most well-directed Hitchcock riffs this side of De Palma, particularly in the first two acts (which outrun pretty much every other superhero movie sans BvS) but I can’t help feeling we could do with an optimistic Batman movie sometime soon. I’d love to see more from this team.
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Mirch Masala 1987
It is less specific than my favourite Mehta films (particularly Maya Memsaab) but this lack of specificity it makes up for in fury; the correlation of the text's women with the plants which grow (literally) from below ground toward visibility is a startling aesthetic principle that the film makes intelligent use of. In fact, even many of the film's male characters are associated with the same imagery (not least through the use of the colour red, but also through the odd match-cut) but this is always framed carefully and explicitly as an abuse of those below, as a punching-down, even an appropriation of sorts.