Wish I could interact with the source material, but I can't. So this is restricted to the film. Welles' voiceover at the beginning describes what follows as abiding by the logic of a dream, of a nightmare, an uncannily accurate description. It taps into the individual's fear in the face of society, of guilt by virtue of simply being an individual within a society, of hegemony bearing down on the self and all its implications regarding the law. Here's a…

The farther away I got from having seen Caché, the more I found myself characterizing it as a cruel film. Not sure why, since a rewatch reminds/convinces me that it's really a critique of cruelty. Tapping into the (post-)colonial )micro-)atrocities committed by the French against Algerians, the film's use of mysterious elements by way of the thriller genre, long takes by way of art cinema, and suggestions of repressed guilt born out of denial by a character who claims childhood…

There are films, and then there is How Green Was My Valley. It is, for me, the standard. I have never been so affected by a film as this one, so chock-full it is of joy and heartbreak of the most real kinds. The film finds and allows those moments of feeling to happen, putting them on screen fearlessly and powerfully. Sentimentality be damned, these are people and this is a world and these are events and moments and relations…