Favorite films

Recent activity

• 

  ★★★★★

• 

• 

• 

  ★★★★½

Recent reviews

• 

  Muriel, or the Time of Return 1963

  ★★★★★ Watched by Stephen Mortland 30 Jun 2022

  Requires a second viewing. But without question I can say that the combined document of Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, and Muriel makes for one of (if not THE) most significant reflections on time, memory, and alienation in all of cinema.

• 

  The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris 1915

  ★★★★½ Rewatched by Stephen Mortland 28 Jun 2022

  Hard to parse thoughts on something so gigantic. Something about the visual representation of paranoia. Something about networks of myth making. Something about cinematic attention and meaning-making. Something about the staying power of fractured images. Something about Mazamette. Something about performance, masks, and poison.Something about “I am a movie fanatic!”

Popular reviews

• 

  Beau Travail 1999

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by Stephen Mortland 19 Sep 2020 2

  Watch Beau Travail
  Go to sleep
  Wake up
  Rewatch Beau Travail

• 

  Blackhat 2015

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by Stephen Mortland 24 Nov 2020 1

  I drastically underrated this on my first watch. In Blackhat, Mann’s archetypal "doomed protagonist" scales up—working alongside governments, traveling internationally, balancing the fates of countless men and women unknown. It is no longer the world of regional crime, but a world of ubiquitous threat, the inscrutable anxieties of modernity. 

  The dismissal the film has received (and my own lackluster first watch), must have something to do with how enthusiastically Mann employs the language and theatrics of cybercrime. The language of…