I'm a boring purist but a flexible one. I write more about film at CelluloidDimension.com
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The Other 1972
Impressively clumsy. Apparently, it only takes 10 minutes into the plot to predict the entire movie. There are two plot twists, one is more functional than the other, but both are equally arbitrary. It's not that the film doesn't take the right steps to psychologically manipulate its audience, it's that its filmmaking system has no tactics whatsoever to cope with the gargantuan tragic proportions of the solemn story. When we meet the two child twins we never see them in…
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Comrade X 1940
King Vidor's Ninotchka-esque political satire about a doughty American reporter (Clark Gable) in the Soviet Union chronicling its treacherous internecine politics is artistically constrained by the Hollywood propaganda tradition of the early 1940s and thus prevented from being a work of open-minded perspectives, yet it is effervescently humorous, charmingly endowed with screwball madness and romantic nonsense making it instantly irresistible. There is no Vidorian realism here, but the systematic classicism is direct and frenetic as are its dialectical characters; these…
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Written on the Wind 1956
Perfectly paced, masterfully acted, unerring narrative structure, preposterously melodramatic, terrifying and aesthetically handsome film with a hyperactive temperament. The decadence of American high society has never looked so sharp and perilously tragic as in this absolute masterpiece by the most sentimental of all filmmakers, Douglas Sirk. Fascinatingly this film brings together all the classic ingredients to morph into a lush, full-length epic, yet Douglas Sirk only needs just over an hour and a half to dynamite fatalism and voluptuous romanticism…
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Holy Motors 2012
An inexhaustible challenge and attack on the meaning of cinema within the desensitization of the digital age of filmmaking, it finds artistic possibilities by mutating the insipidly empty into the true purity that the medium of film represents. A philosophical passage through life and the fundamental role of cinema in our existence, it is a delightful piece of criticism that never feels heavily irritating, containing inscrutable sequences worthy of obsessive attention to discover the abundant creativity and vitality that the…
