Letterboxd — Your life in film

It's fitting that Sense8 should make it onto Letterboxd in some fashion because it's one of the only shows on TV right now that actually tells its story cinematically. Sure, prestige cable dramas of recent vintage have significantly beefed up their production values and become very slick and stylish, but the breathless critical claims that these developments have ushered in some kind of widespread "cinematic" renaissance in television are pretty erroneous. In truth, when it comes down to it the…

It took me perhaps a little too long to catch on to what was really happening, but once I did hooooly shit did this movie grab me by the throat and clench like few others have.

Martel's restraint here is nothing short of Olympian. I can't imagine there wasn't a strong temptation to let this keep spiraling out into the kind of paranoid conspiracy thriller the video store arguably mislabeled this as, or at least to just let the other…

This movie really drives home just how intricately detailed and loving Davies' reconstructions of the midcentury Liverpool of his childhood are in Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. So many of the memories so beautifully rendered in those films have near-exact archival analogues in this one: ecstatically ornate movie palaces, oppressively ornate churches, children at play outside rough but invitingly homey row houses, the inevitable erosion and destruction of those houses, long-suffering saintly mothers washing clothes and…

MIRIAM FUCKING HOPKINS.

Anyway, as always I'm amazed by Lubitsch's peerless ability to tell a compelling, dynamic, hilarious story about clear-eyed adults in plausible conflicts that are ultimately resolved in a mature fashion, something nearly every other romantic comedy would try to have you believe is impossible. And I love this movie's fantasy prewar Europe of absurd formalities and charmingly low stakes, it's like Stefan Zweig with more dirty jokes. Kind of an odd choice to cast a musical without…