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Cowboy and "Indian" Film 1958
This is kind of like Kenneth Anger conjuring up the first act of A Movie. It's kind of anti-technique, so your experience may vary based on your appreciation for the magick that made it, but I'm a firm proponent of more axes in the editing room.
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Non-Fiction 2018
A lot of people are going to find something to love in this, but this dialogue-heavy Rohmerian format usually doesn't work for me. A lot of the writing is interesting, but translating it to the screen or even into a performance comes off like an afterthought.
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The City Without Jews 1924
It's nice to see a 1920s narrative that differentiates between "Jewish people are hoarding all the money" and "the people with all the money are hoarding all the money". But The City Without Jews is, at heart, a family drama, and what it posits early on as a structural economic problem gets largely ignored for the rest of the film. It rubbed me the wrong way that two different characters had to have a change of heart because they both…
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The Witches 1990
So in this adaptation of a Roald Dahl novel, Nicolas Roeg recreates the Odessa steps sequence in a scene that presumably puts Anjelica Huston in the role of a Cossack soldier. This is the weirdest game of mad libs.
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A Fantastic Woman 2017
Daniela Vega's got tremendous presence, but this movie has some odd ideas about how to melodrama.
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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri 2017
The first Martin McDonagh film I've seen. Overall it did a nice job of snapping between tragedy and humor to meander through grey areas weave a very Catholic story about guilt and loss. I'm confused how that got bizarrely grafted onto the incidental stories of a woman who was murdered and a man who was tortured.