You Were Not Really Here is a brutal, stark, and impressionistic art house film crafted by the highly talented Lynne Ramsey. It is an incredibly lean film, striped of all extraneous shots. The movie tells the story of an ex-marine named Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) with a traumatic past who is hired to rescue the daughter of a senator who who has been kidnapped and put to work in an underage brothel against her will. The whole movie is told from…

2018-2019 Letterboxd Season challenge

Week 10: November 11th-17th
Roger Ebert Week

Cat People is a horror film that creates frights entirely based on atmospheric fear and dread, rather than gore, shocks and violence. The story is one of a Serbian woman with a mysterious ancestry that may or may not be connected with the occult who refuses to sleep with her American husband for fear she will turn into a panther and devour him. The movie is entirely devoid of…

The Other Side of the Wind is a long-delayed film by Orson Welles, showcasing some of his most ambitious and greatest filmmaking. The movie is loosely structured as a faux documentary chronicling the last day in the life of Jake Hannaford (John Houston), on his 70th birthday. Hannaford holds a birthday party at his house for his friends and colleagues, most of whom are from the movie industry. He uses this event to show off footage from his latest over-the-top,…

Damien Chazelle’s First Man is beautifully crafted film that recreates the events leading up to the first moon landing, with Ryan Gosling playing Neil Armstrong. Several action sequences in the film involving test flights in preparation to go to the moon and the moon landing sequence itself are gripping, exciting and stunning to look at. Who knew that Chazelle would be so adept at filming an action film? However, I thought parts of the movie were flat out boring and…