Letterboxd — Your life in film

One of the hippest directors of the counterculture era, Altman is a Hollywood filmmaker who focused on the messier parts of life that other pictures had always left out. Altman finds the pompous attitude of Los Angeles residents to be an appalling embarrassment and views them all as shameful creatures, desperate comfort-seekers who actively sabotage their own futures and happiness. But he doesn't hate humanity; he has no delusions of grandeur, and expresses not anger, but further shame. He knows…

Once, I was in the town square
when a girl asked me for directions.
I played her a song
she sang right along
and asked if I wanted to go for a beer.

Once, I went for a beer with a girl
We played music and treasured the moment.
Our harmonies blended
And so I suggested
Perhaps we could take on the world.

Once, I took on the world with this lady.
She invited me into her home.
I discovered…

in 70mm

He's licorice, she's pizza. They're both spunky loveable junk food that belong at the same juvenile parties, but they're not a combination one expects to find on any self-respecting menu. Paul Thomas Anderson, following up his daring romantic drama Phantom Thread, is once again completely unbothered by such social constructs. The director's 3rd trip to 70s LA is breezy and hilarious, moving with the chaotic energy of Inherent Vice and the flamboyant dream logic of Punch Drunk Love,…

Costner's Elliot Ness is a levelheaded man of justice, and Deniro's Al Capone is a bad, violent man, even if you take the arbitrarity of his anti-prohibition criminality into account, but The Untouchables is far from a "good" vs "bad" movie – it's America vs Anti-America. Like his contemporaries Coppola and Scorsese, de Palma's film feels deeply rooted in American soil, as though this is a land's-eye-view historical judgement of the antiquated belief that America could only survive if patriotism…

Fargo is a movie about real life. Real life isn't made up of neat narrative arcs and clean happy endings. It's messy, random, and things happen for no reason. You probably won't have a hero's journey, and if you do it probably won't take place in three acts. This is clearly the same amusingly senseless Coens who would next make The Big Lebowski, full of entertaining characters, clever dialogue, and a plot that gets increasingly convoluted only to end up…

There is an uncontrollable mania suppressed tightly just beneath the surface, underlying every moment, frantically gnawing at the restraints that keep it under control, actively threatening to violently disrupt the precarious equilibrium. There is a relentless urgency implicit beneath moments of apparent tranquility as Caleb Landry Jones disappears into his role, becoming an unnerving, deeply uncomfortable presence. It is a bleak experience of moral disorientation and ethical turmoil, on top of such overt horrors as the human capability for evil...…

Robert Altman is a cinematic scientist, but Short Cuts feels less like an experiment and more like a master craftsman at the peak of his ability, applying the amassed experience of a storied career and the results of decades of prior experimentation into a proudly humble cinematic epic. Calling it an epic feels misplaced, as it is a film grounded in characters and revolving around their interweaving narratives, but at over 3 hours long and with 22 main characters, any…