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A Single Man 2009
turning a big dial taht says "Saturation" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right
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Short Fuse 1992
Show me some ACT UP footage set to anything off of Now That's What I Call Disco and I will start crying in the theatre, marvel at your immense artistic talent, and give your movie no fewer than three stars. I'm not proud of it, but I also wasn't expecting Warren Sonbert to be the one leveraging that.
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Let the Corpses Tan 2017
I think Cattet–Forzani put it best when they said "[wood creaking] [rubber squeaking] [sizzling meat] [leather scrunching] [audible gleam] [gunshot] [sandpaper scratching] [exhaling quickly] [another gunshot] [hand rubbing the barrel of a rifle up and down] [snap crackle pop] [punching a melon] [just full on fellating the microphone]."
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The Grand Bizarre 2018
The downside to Jodie Mack making a feature-length work is that now I have all these patterns permanently engraved on my retinas, and I don't even know their names.
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So Is This 1982
I
accidentally
started
reading
This
in
the
voice
of
Gilbert
Gottfried
and
it
broke
my
brain.
It
went
away
when
This
switched
over
to
French,
but
then
it
came
back.
Just
in
time
for
the
optical
cranial
singing.
It
was
painful.
Now
I'm
writing
this
review
word
by
word
in
his
voice.
New
paragraph.
Michael
Snow
is
a
dick. -
I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother… 1976
What René Allio pulls off here is kind of great. He basically repurposes the true crime story to look at both documentary and murder movies. The cast is divided into professional actors playing the authority figures and non-professional actors from the area playing the peasants. It makes the performances kind of farcical, which in a film about the transformation of society and the re-education of a people, makes it a lot easier to read against the grain of the actual…
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They Live 1988
I really like how slow the build is in They Live. It takes over an hour for anyone else to see the world as it is, and even then it's after Carpenter has the audience begging to just get on with it already. His willingness to make the film ugly allows him to instead spend a good bit of the runtime mapping out Nada's path through the shantytown and grimy alleys, hiding out under a deck, or diving through garbage. It makes the journey into yuppie territory all the more alien.
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Far from Heaven 2002
Every moment in this film is beautiful, and it's so tightly controlled that it's suffocating. Todd Haynes stylizes every shot within an inch of its life in a flagrant show of bravura, down to the smallest details of the lighting and costuming. When Cathy breaks it off with Raymond, Julianne Moore is wrapped in a coat that perfectly blends in with the stone building, matching its color and texture. When shot from behind, she becomes just a floating pink headscarf.…