Letterboxd — Your life in film

Oleg Zagorodnii and Tom Prior have faces that could launch a thousand ships. The erudite lovers that the actors play in Firebird might appreciate that allusion, but from the evidence on display throughout this drama, you don’t doubt that director Peeter Rebane would deem it too indirect for his purposes. This is a film, after all, where Roman (Zagorodnii) and Sergey (Prior), some five years after they first ended their clandestine love affair, reunite in Moscow and Sergey bitterly airs…

This docu-fiction pseudo-science/self-help hokum made $16 million at the North American box office in 2004, despite being indistinguishable from a Tim & Eric sketch. A bunch of talking-head experts spout a dizzying onslaught of facts, non-facts, and rank nonsense about how ideas are more "real" than matter, which eventually accumulate into a personal wellness philosophy that is somewhere between The Secret and Scientology. The points are articulated in a fictional strand starring Marlee Matlin as a woman undergoing a spiritual crisis,…

The latest in a long string of films - 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, Dangerous Game, New Rose Hotel, 4:44 Last Day on Earth - in which Ferrara has put his real-life wife or girlfriend in a sex scene. I admire how Ferrara, like Jess Franco before him, has only become more prolific as his budgets have dried up, and has used these circumstances to blur the distinction between art and life. Very accurate in its depiction of the…

I’ve probably seen this a half-dozen times. I’ll probably see it a half-dozen more times. Bruce Lee didn’t make many movies, so you take what you can get. This is the only completed movie he directed, and thus the only one that is completely an articulation of his personality and ideas. It has the iconic Chuck Norris fight - a small masterpiece of both athleticism and visual storytelling. And it has a sizeable number of indelible Bruce Lee Is A…

The film is pretty loved on here, so feel free to ignore this lone mad voice, but man, this did nothing for me. It's competently directed, looks great, has committed performance, and a couple of fun gags (nail!), but it feels endlessly trapped in the first ten minutes of a second act. Every time it feels like it's going to break out into the bloody chaos, the movie pulls back. I don't get it. Why introduce so many characters if…

Stephen Chow stars as a re-incarnated Monkey King who runs the Axe Gang out of an inn (a running theme in his work) which is invaded by two sisters (Skull Face and Giant Spider) who are looking to eat the flesh of a monk.

It's much simpler than it sounds.

This is everything a Hong Kong movie can be: Endlessly inventive, hilarious, and jaw-droppingly visual. It plays on a surprisingly small scale yet still involves big prosthetic spiders, bull kings…

I actually thought Live Free Or Die Hard, the fourth Die Hard movie, was moderately interesting, because it gives John McClane a younger sidekick (played by Justin Long) whose primary purpose is to be terrified at what a reckless, soul-deadened psychopath McClane has become, and how inured he is to violence and catastrophe after all he's been through. It invites people to examine action-movie heroes, and how essentially inhuman they've become. This sequel, though, presents McClane as a psychopath without…

Shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election, Alexandra Pelosi (daughter of Nancy) decides that America is too polarized and that what we need to do is talk to each other. So she goes to red states to have unenlightening conversations with Trump voters. Because people are not reducible to how they vote, Pelosi hears some things she disagree with (many of her interviewees are anti-choice and anti-feminist), and some things that give her pause (a laid-off coal miner argues…