Extended Cut
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
-
Chie the Brat 1981
Like My Neighbors the Yamadas, this starts off in a sketchy, cartoonish mode, then gracefully introduces a strong emotional core, which then (equally gracefully) dovetails with a subplot about cat testicles. Takahata was, if nothing else, a master of tone, and I'm disappointed by this film's total obscurity — it's far more personal than Horus: Prince of the Sun and shakes off the sentimentality of his Masterpiece Theater TV work, creating a class-conscious world that's attentive to human nuance and resistant to any tidy conclusions.
Popular reviews
More-
Monos 2019
Cowardly and apolitical. Has no interest in what has shaped the kids' ideologies — why they signed up as soldiers in the first place, or, as in Nocturama, how their relationship to culture has fed into their alienation — and deprives us of a time and place. So what's left is a bunch of self-consciously unpleasant scenes that evoke Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now but stripped of context, ideas, and purpose. And people have praised this as a…
-
Long Day's Journey Into Night 2018
Hard to put into words why this had me from the first shot — a woozy song playing as the camera pans upwards, taking in a disco ball of bright green light, seeming to turn upside-down — only to land, right way up, in a completely different room, the aftermath of a tryst. Is it future, or is it past? And is this what sets off Luo's (Huang Jue) obsessive journey for love, or is it a matter after the…