Favorite films

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  ★★★½

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  ★★★★★

Pinned reviews

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  Waiting 2020

  Watched by RichLV 27 May 2021

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

  Waiting is a gentle, but present and somewhat kinetic, meditation on the human and natural experience of waiting, replete with gorgeous visuals, and directive sound. Resolving, like the waiting period itself, towards an endpoint. Tentative beads of sweat, the overhead flash of a bold red suit in a functional 'green' space. We are treated to the synchronous sway of a chrysalis in time with a ticking clock -- the built and the natural, the prisons of dead time and a screw-top jar. A ladybird on a crucial test result. Squash courts and launderettes. Bedrooms and bathrooms. Friends and lovers. New life.

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  Café Paraíso 2008

  ★★★★ Watched by RichLV 06 Feb 2021

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

  Café Paraíso constructs the grimy grind of being under the greasy thumb with sweaty and desperate central performances in a cauldron of indifference. We stand beside and follow kitchen worker, Gallo, at close quarters through narrow backroom hallways and a warren of overflowing bins and ad-hoc kitchen stainless steel. Sound emphasises the assault on the senses, the personhood. Monochrome photography explicates the stultifying oppression of living on the marginal, subsistence employment with stifled, half-formed dreams. Dreaming of self-assertion. Ants trapped in a soapy aspic, awaiting a contact with a life-giving water. Trapped in an unforgiving structure, they will never see it.

Recent reviews

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  Klute 1971

  ★★★★★ Watched by RichLV 11 Jun 2022

  Listen; I can die happy now that I have feasted on Gordon Willis's sumptuous cinematography. I can't recall the last time the table was lain out with such an abundance of riches. Gorgeous, but intriguing composition. Grime and gristle. Colour and cool. Creepy wide shots and split diopters. Cutting off two-thirds of the screen to crowd out Fonda's Bree.

  In concert with Willis's cinematography, Pakula largely allows Klute to unfurl languidly and patiently--except when he doesn't. Bree checking her watch…

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  Boiling Point 2021

  ★★★½ Watched by RichLV 29 May 2022

  A single take? That's nuts.

Popular reviews

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  Enemy of the State 1998

  ★★★★½ Rewatched by RichLV 27 Sep 2020

  There's nothing like an anti-surveillance state, conspiracy thriller to lift my mood.

  Enemy of the State, which is one of the first 'grown up' films I remember seeing, should be credited with sparking my <s>paranoia</s> reasonable, logically-founded fears and concerns. An introduction to mature awareness of potential for abuse of state power. I used to fantasise about having to destroy all traces of my life, disappear, go underground, because of an errant phone call.

  It's tremendous fun. Tony Scott's pacing…

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  Leave No Trace 2018

  ★★★★★ Watched by RichLV 23 Aug 2019

  Brutal and sensitive. Underpinned by Thomasin McKenzie's central performance of glorious tenderness, innocence, and deep emotional strength. Ben Foster moves mountains. Directed such that it unfolds gently and naturally, but never flagging, always giving us something to think about, something to feel, something to wonder, people to sit with, a landscape to marvel at, contradictions to absorb. I haven't been moved in this way since I saw The Florida Project. I have more thoughts, but I'm just going to let this one sit with me for the moment.