El Sur (Victor Erice, 1983): 3.5/5
You have a mystery inside you. A whole world of everything your parents ever did before you were conceived—a world that you can never enter, never comprehend, though you might strain in vain for a glimpse. Estrella, the heroine of EL SUR, tries to solve that mystery by rummaging through her own piecemeal memories. Her voiceover structures this interior pilgrimage; dissolves and fades to black demarcate each block of the past. She remembers her impolite questions, her naive mistakes. She recalls the acoustics and the softness of the light in each room of her family's house. She dwells with objects: hand-colored photos, a skein of red yarn, her father's pendulum. She doesn't find her answers, but the fact that she looks is achingly potent.


Guinea Pig 6: Mermaid in the Manhole (Hideshi Hino, 1988): 0.5/5
A melancholy, tragic film about the passage of time and the inability to hold on to happy memories; joy and beauty are fleeting and ultimately unattainable. Also it’s about a rotting puss-filled mermaid. That too.


From Mayerling to Sarajevo (Max Ophuls, 1940): 3.5/5
WW1 started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife. It is a fact most people know but who were they and what did they stand for? Fewer know the answer to that.

We all know how this story is going to end, so Ophuls skips starting out with the assassination. Instead he introduces us to Ferdinand, then to how he met the Duchess and their happy love affair. Knowing the ending makes the happiness all the more painful. Future governor, US congressman, and Ambassador John Lodge plays Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Photogenic Edwige Feuillere plays his love, Sophie Chotek.


Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948): 2/5
I don't find stalking very romantic and Lisa (Joan Fontaine) was literally not given a personality outside of devoting her entire life to this guy who repeatedly failed to literally recognize her after numerous meetings.


They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948): 3/5
The names in this movie.... Chickamaw? Keechie? T-dub? Are they jellicle cats.

A fine debut from Ray, but the film exists primarily to be remembered as an early draft for the director’s more distinctive later work.


Fabalas (Jacque Becker, 1945): 3/5
Ubiquitous mannequin for Best Supporting Actress.

(This was a key inspiration for PHANTOM THREAD and makes for a perfect double-bill.)


Zola (Janicza Bravo, 2020): 3/5
I wonder: what's the value in capturing the Zeitgeist when the Zeitgeist sucks?

Also, an ending would have been nice. Extra star for the stellar cast though.


Old (M. Night Shyamalan, 2021): 1.5/5
Missed opportunity: Drink a coca-cola on that beach and immediately piss out a kidney stone.


rewatched The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955): 5/5
Imagine making one movie and it’s like the best movie.

Satan knows Scripture better than most.


Mandibles (Quentin Dupieux, 2020): 3.5/5
French Dumb & Dumber by way of Kafka. Adele Exarchopoulos' gonzo performance here simply must be seen.


Wedding in Blood (Claude Chabrol, 1973): 2/5
Tediously tawdry and banal.


rewatched Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985): 3.5/5
Also starring Kim Greist, in the role of Not Ellen Barkin Goddamn It Why Is She Not Ellen Barkin.


Pig (Michael Sarnoski, 2021): 2.5/5
Never gets quite as weird as it clearly wants to. A key few moments do connect, but largely the film doesn't find its footing. Also subtracting half a star because it has that loathsome underlit digital aesthetic that's everywhere now, where you just want to break into the movie and flip a lightswitch.


So Dark the Night (Joseph H. Lewis, 1946): 2.5/5
Ridiculous to the degree that it almost works because of how ridiculous it is, but played with a straight enough face that you’re never sure how much is satire vs. serious, right down to the pungent, quasi-French accents. Painless, but ultimately forgettable.


White Girl (Elizabeth Wood, 2016): 2.5/5
Wholly unpleasant but I guess that's the point? Doesn't actually say much about its character's privilege until the end, but it is a potent image.


Miami Blues (George Armitage, 1990): 3.5/5
Quirky doodle of a B-movie with three superlative performances (including Baldwin's finest, fueled by heedless abandon that only the young and unpracticed possess), bountiful tacky atmosphere, and a uniquely off-kilter aesthetic that pares every scene down to its lightly absurdist essence.


Lancelot of the Lake (Robert Bresson, 1974): 3.5/5
Love what Bresson does here, draping his typical, earthly disillusionment—people are ruthless, shitty creatures filled with malice, greed, and spite and the world is an endless sinkhole of torment and distress from which there is no material absolution—over a peculiar context: The Twelfth Century. The result is nearly disorienting, subverting so much of what we’ve come to expect from period pieces of similar times, stripped bare of the traditional glamour and exoticism.


I Know Who Killed Me (Chris Siverston, 2007): 0.5/5
If we all hadn't been so hard on this movie Lindsay Lohan wouldn't have fallen into her whiskey bottle and she'd still be thriving today. She took pole-dancing lessons and filmed this entire movie while on-and-off from rehab, and for what? We're all the reason we don't have a sequel to MEAN GIRLS! I know who killed Lindsay, it was US.

Also, the first credit at the end of the movie is “Fat Teena”.


Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996): 3/5
Might be the horniest film ever made, underestimate it at your own peril.


Freddy Got Fingered (Tom Green, 2001): No Rating
God Bless A.O. Scott: https://www.nytimes.com/.../film-review-shocking-sure-if...


The Apartment (Gilles Mimouni, 1996): 2/5
Incredibly dated and convoluted.


My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969): 3.5/5
Like a sex comedy version of My Dinner With Andre. Covers as much ground as a Godard film but with tranquility, not abrasiveness.


Queen of the Damned (Michael Rymer, 2002): 1/5
A movie simultaneously too corny and too KoЯny.


Pinocchio (Roberto Benigni, 2002): 0.5/5
A rollercoaster that only goes down. (Watched the sublimely horrible English dub version with the revolting uncanniness of hearing Breckin Meyer's voice, leaning into boyish enthusiasm, emerging from Roberto Benigni's face.)

The goal was obviously to capture a Fellini-flavored sense of the carnivalesque, and what should be magically exaggerated is instead mostly garish and gross, especially in the half-committed makeup used to make humans look like humans badly feigning fantastic animals. Truly a Cats-level miscalculation all around.


The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorcese, 1988): 3/5
I mostly dig this all-too-human depiction of a figure who's traditionally beatific to the point of tedium; Dafoe gives good anguish, portraying Jesus as a sort of manic-depressive who vacillates between holy ardor and abject terror, and Scorsese encourages the actors to perform Schrader's script naturalistically, so that e.g. Keitel sounds credibly exasperated saying things like "No YOU listen. Every day you have a different plan! First it's love. Then it's the axe. And now you have to die! What good could that do?" Which is closer to how I'd imagine the disciples would truly react than, say, Matthew 16:22, in which Peter merely expresses his preference that Jesus not die, and gets called Satan for his trouble.


The Woman in the Window (Joe Wright, 2021): 1.5/5
REAR WINDOW but it's James Stewart investigating the murder of Amy Adams' Oscar chances.


False Positive (John Lee, 2021): 1.5/5
Only watched for my homeslice Ilana Glazer.


Good On Paper (Kim Gatewood, 2021): 2/5
Only watched for my homeslice Margaret Cho.


The Kingdom (Lars von Trier, 1994): 3/5
Rhythms and compositions are unmistakably televisual. Hard to believe 16mm was the capture format; whatever Von Trier did in post to make the series look like a primitive DV shot through a piss-soaked rag, I'm glad it didn't catch on.


Medea (Lars von Trier, 1988): 3.5/5
LvT has famously always been open about his love for Dreyer as a director, arguably his favorite one together with Tarkovsky, so it is only fitting that he directed a television production of the Greek myth of Medea based on Dreyer's own script.


The Element of Crime (Lars von Trier, 1984): 2/5
Certainly the sulfurous yellow look is distinctive and the arresting detritus within the production design. But the narrative here merely amounts to the notion that cops and criminals are really two aspects of the same person. (See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this.)

Also, can anyone explain to me why the hell we're staring at a lemur in the final shot of the movie? I don't get it.


The Apple (Menahem Gloan, 1980): 0.5/5
More like XANADON'T.

Can’t even begin to imagine how much cocaine was on set.


rewatched Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964): 1.5/5
I honestly struggle to find a redeeming quality in RED DESERT beyond the industrial scenery porn because there's just so much wrong with it on a base level. The dialog is insufferable*, the protagonist is so incomprehensible (her backstory, her weird physical tics, what motivates her, how she changes - literally, idk), Monica Vitti lacks any real acting talent, the so-called sexual tension is unerotic at best and dubbed Richard Harris borders on laughable. I agree with Andrei Tarkovsky about this one - i.e. Antonioni was so distracted by visual aesthetics that he allowed the story/character to become a complete muddle.

(*Excluding "My hair hurts." because it sums up my thoughts on the film entirely.)


rewatched Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958): 3/5
dudes always say "i'm fighting demons" look if u a lil gay just say that