-
The Parallel Street 1962
“‘Señora,’ said Velásquez, ‘the pursuit of happiness can, it seems to me, be compared to the solution of a quadratic or cubic equation. You know the last term and you know that it is the product of all the roots, but before having exhausted all the divisors you reach a certain number of imaginary roots. Meanwhile the day goes by and you have had the pleasure of engaging in calculation.’”
-Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
-
Lovers Rock 2020
closing my eyes and serenely imagining myself going back into hiding the day after covid ends because my ear-splitting karaoke rendition of “Silly Games” gave every person in K-Town tinnitus and an angry mob is forming
-
Twin Peaks: The Return 2017
Every '90s Kid knows that if you miss your old familiar friends, they're waiting just around the bend. But unlike nearly every other reboot, revival, and ripoff in this gilded age of pop culture dumpster diving, the new season of Twin Peaks acutely recognizes that "just around the bend" can only ever be a shallow and fleeting fantasy, never a real place to which we can actually return. It doesn't matter how much of the original cast and crew you…
-
-
The Draughtsman's Contract 1982
I once saw Borges described as “food for hungry brains,” and I think Greenaway often serves a similar purpose.
-
-
Cluny Brown 1946
"Stay angry, and everything will be alright."
To me, the famously indefinable "Lubitsch Touch" might best be described as that of an expertly administered flu shot. An inoculation against weariness in dark times, miraculously sharp and gentle in equal measure.
-
Late Spring 1949
I am in love with the elliptical editing in this movie, the idiosyncratic yet precise choices Ozu makes to represent and manipulate time. There's that famous, wonderfully ambiguous insert of the vase in Noriko and her father's Kyoto hotel room, of course, but I think my favorite illustration of this technique is when Noriko and Hattori are out on their bike ride. They ride past the foregrounded Coca-Cola sign and out of the frame, and then in the next shot…
-
Little Fugitive 1953
Whatever, Tom Cruise, Richie Andrusco did all his own stunts too and he was seven years old.
-
First Reformed 2017
This film left me in stunned silence, at least until the lights came up and one of the gaggle of tiny children who had inexplicably been brought to this movie immediately popped out of her seat and loudly quipped “there won’t be a second one.”
-
The Misfits 1961
"Maybe you're not supposed to believe people. Maybe it's not even fair to them."
The look on Monroe's face as she listens to Gable describe what it's like to "just live" might be the saddest thing I have ever seen in a movie.
-
Nathan for You: Finding Frances 2017
Say what you will about the dubious talents or the even more dubious life choices of Bill Heath, when he performs “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas” the man commands the room like a bonafide goddamn *star*.