Letterboxd — Your life in film

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah: Baby's First Hoop-Tober (3.0)

When a bird or a mouse gets into the house, we freak out not because we think they can harm us but because we know that they don't belong there, that they've introduced disorder and dirtiness into the home we work so hard to keep nice and clean. Their presence indoors feels wrong, like they've violated some unspoken agreement that separates our world from theirs.

The Birds takes that common anxiety and dials…

Between this film and the even better (somehow, as if that's even fair) The Long Day Closes I'm quickly realizing that Terence Davies is pretty much hands down the master of illustrating the act of memory on screen. He just nails it. The fragmentation, the way certain spaces (here, the childhood home and the local pub) act as anchors for memory's drifting back and forth through time, the way pop culture and history are organically threaded into the texture of…

I (child on swing)(bouncing balls)(peeling an orange)(split face) this movie.

There are so many clever decisions here that make this film not only eminently watchable but also a surprising amount of fun. Like how some of the images have little visual stories that progress with each cycle (a wall is painted, a tire is changed, an orange is peeled), sometimes in unexpected ways (the stopping and sudden restarting of N, the weirdly suspenseful climax of H), or the way the…

Watching this movie made me painfully aware of how fundamentally self-absorbed most of our popular stories about children are. When the protagonists of those stories inevitably break free from the dull, adult-imposed strictures of daily life to go on their adventures, it's almost always mainly for their own personal gratification or edification, the rest of the world be damned.

Here it's quite the opposite. Ahmed sets out on his journey for entirely selfless reasons, risking his own punishment to prevent…