rewatched The Lighthouse (Rob Eggers, 2019): 2.5/5

B&W sophomore effort that I respected for its crazed ambition but didn’t actually much enjoy (and will not be revisiting again).

Ultimately the madness feels arbitrary, skin-deep, as if Eggers settled on the actors and location without fully working out what they’d do there. THE WITCH drew considerable power from its sheer nightmarish conviction, and that element is largely absent here. (Also not a big fan of fart jokes.)

Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964): 3/5

"The Woman of the Snow" is far and away the best of the four, in terms of both visual splendor and overall creepiness.

Ballad of a Soldier (Gregoriy Chukhray, 1959): 3/5

Pleasant picaresque of handsome, young Russki soldier given a six-day leave after some accidental heroics to visit his mama. Along the way he encounters and chastely falls in love with a beautiful, young devotchka. The shot in the beginning where Vladimir Ivashov is pursued by a tank and the camera turns completely upside-down is pretty cool. But the final meeting with Mother in the rustic village is just too drawn out and mawkish, and director Chukhray is no Mikhail Kalatozov; THE CRANES ARE FLYING is in a whole other artistic league.

Frownland (Ronald Bronstein, 2007): 3.5/5

Dore Mann, in his screen debut, concocts a specimen so ghastly as to be at once unwatchable and utterly mesmerizing. Truly one of the most amazing performances of a social pathology I've ever seen.

Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000): 0/5

Without a single redeeming quality, this THING - this mistake in nature - lives up to its infamy as a cinephile's bete noire. (LITERALLY EVERY SHOT IS A DUTCH ANGLE. I NOW HAVE PTSD WHENEVER I SEE A TRANSITION WIPE.)

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (John De Bello, 1978): 2/5

Every bit as ridiculous as I'd expect a movie about killer tomatoes to be, but also more funny than I'd have imagined, too, which was an unexpected surprise. (Think of AIRPLANE's more slapstickish elements, viz. none of the clever wordplay but all of the constant satire poking). That lack of cleverness is essentially what drives the film's score down for me, because even at just over 90-minutes, it exhausts most of its comedic firepower within the first half and kind of just riffs off those same basic ideas for the remainder of the movie . The film's composure is laughably bad, too, but I'm sure that's "part of the charm," literally seeing tomatoes just roll over bodies lying on the floor.

Best bit: "I work for the personnel proficiency planning for Pago-Pago Paratrooper Platoon Patrol." / "Ohhh, Operation PPPPPPP [mouthed fart noise]."

Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002): 2/5

Interesting that this got made as is, with no concessions to commercial viability whatsoever. (Most of the film consists simply of Damon and Affleck silently walking, or sitting, or eventually shuffling. Many shots are held for a small eternity.)

Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948): 3/5

Expressionistic opening is a stunner, and from a purely formal standpoint, MOONRISE may well be Borzage's masterpiece. The film really needed a stronger lead than Dane Clark, though—Borzage reportedly wanted John Garfield, who would've been perfect—and the script has an unfortunate tendency to articulate its themes in dialogue, as if we're too dense to understand why Hawkins is a tortured hunk of self-loathing.

A Married Woman (Godard, 1964): 3/5

I think this might play for people who normally struggle with Godard. In many ways this is his most minimalist work. The political screeds and homages/references to older films are tamped down as Godard tries to work through his feelings about men and women, love and sex (presumably as his own marriage slides inexorably toward doom).

The Whole Town's Talking (John Ford, 1935): 3/5

This reminded me a lot of an old Looney Tunes where Porky has a gangster doppelgänger.

What I personally found most fascinating was the effects work. Ford employs a nearly flawless combination of simple shot/reverse shot editing, body doubling, split screen composites and front projection to achieve the twinning of Edward G. Robinson. There's even a wide shot, both twins on either side, with a mirror straight in the center of the frame just next to the composite seam, just to sell the illusion that much more. Also pretty amazing is a shot of Robinson and his double both reflected in a mirror, before the camera pulls back to have Robinson enter the foreground while he, his reflection, and the double's reflection all remain in focus in the mirror. At first I thought there must have been a hole in the wall instead of a mirror, but realized eventually that there must have been a projection screen behind Robinson and the camera, with the mirror reflecting both. Really jaw dropping stuff.

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974): 2.5/5

Based on its reputation and Criterion's descriptive synopsis, I was so excited to finally see this. "A time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama." Those elements are there, but I'd hardly call it an "adventure." More like an undisciplined, ad-libbed nonsense with a 3+ hour runtime. (Speaking of which, after three hours of tomfoolery, witchcraft, drunken potions, shadowplays, and goofing with ghosts I was worried that we would be late to the party. Don't worry! Celine and Julie do, in fact, go boating.)

Love Unto Death (Alain Resnais, 1984): 2.5/5

Almost every scene (and in many cases even just individual shots lasting a few seconds) is followed by footage of snowflakes drifting through what's presumably a night sky, accompanied by urgent, keening strings. It's the sort of vaguely mysterious emotive device that usually recurs a handful of times over the course of a movie to time-lapse key moments—but here Resnais makes it the cement holding every brick together, so intrusive that it almost functions as a wordless Greek chorus. It really generates an uncanny amount of free-floating tension, and I was soon ready to follow LOVE UNTO DEATH (which kicks off quite dramatically even if one ignores those soul-stirring interludes) wherever it might lead.

Sadly, the formal mastery serves a narrative that I find both frustrating and kinda repellent, though it's only in the home stretch that those qualities decisively emerge. (Spent most of the film engrossed and intensely curious about where it was headed.) My frustration lies in Simon's inexplicable resurrection ultimately seeming all but irrelevant. Lots of philosophizing in the third act, but none of it has anything to do with the apparent miracle that opens the film, which could be excised without the need to change a single word. And it's just hard for me to embrace what's essentially a pro-suicide tract, or at least a film that's clearly sympathetic to the notion that one's love for a partner of only TWO MONTHS (!!!) can be so strong that life without that person is no longer worth living.

4:44 Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara, 2011): 2/5

That the world would go about its normal business right up to the end makes for a lovely, at times deeply moving idea, especially as punctuated by occasional plangent acknowledgements of loss.

But I'm afraid I do have to register the standard objections, beginning with Shanyn Leigh and her inexpressive anti-gaze—not as problematic as it might be, given that she spends a big hunk of the film silently painting, but she's still pretty much half the cast, so finding her deeply uninteresting is a problem. Dafoe fares better, naturally, but often seems to be inventing his character as he goes along. The film feels sketchy and sparse in ways that don't complement its solipsistic vision.

Annette (Leos Carax, 2021): 3.5/5

Totally bonkers and sure to be one of the most divisive films of the year. Yeah it's uneven and it doesn’t always hold our breath, but that uninterrupted opening sequence in the streets of Los Angeles (that was filmed right on my street!!!!) was worth the price of admission for me.

The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021): 3/5

A collection of good-looking sequences, at times underwhelming... mostly enjoyable and ultimately aesthetically on brand.

I liked it, I did. I just wanted more from it. Blame the hype or blame the fact this didn’t come out 10 years ago. Or also blame the LAMB trailer that came on right before and stole its thunder.

Also, does every A24 period piece officially require featuring both parents from THE WITCH?

The Aviator's Wife (Eric Rohmer, 1981): 4/5

New favorite Rohmer.

Tabloid (Errol Morris, 2010): 4/5

"He was a DOO-DOO DIPPER."

I'm not convinced there's a whole lot of subtext to this tale apart from "crazy people are crazy," but the Believe It or Not quotient is off the charts; each new development is even more gobsmacking than the last, to the point where Morris' efforts to goose it even further—underlining salacious remarks with tabloid-style graphics and so forth—seems like overkill. For all the ostensible commentary on the media, what I mostly took away from McKinney's saga is the alarming gulf between intelligence and sense. Her I.Q. may well be 168, as she claims—it does indeed take a certain kind of genius to flee the country by posing as a deaf-mute mime—but every idea that big brain comes up with ought to be quarantined.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003): 2/5

me *every 5 minutes*: “where’s Cate Blanchett???"

I don't regret not watching this earlier to be honest. I just don't have the gene in me that will make me like LOTR.

Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981): 2/5

Uncannily prefigures The Onion's classic story "Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested."

John and the Hole (Pascual Sisto, 2021): 2/5

More like YAWN and the hole!!!!!

The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973): 2.5/5

As Roger Ebert put it: "this one could have been titled 'The Man Who Loved to Hear Himself Talk.'"  Basically a three and a half hour cinematic endurance test not of attention span but of tolerance for unlikeable characters loafing and loathing.

Val (Leo Scott and Ting Poo, 2021): 2/5

Being a celebrity is not enough to make a biodoc inherently interesting -  you have to put the celebrity's life in some greater context, make them relatable, etc. and for me this film didn't do that. Best wishes to Val in his continued recovery and I hope he has a happy and healthy remainder of his life but go ahead and skip this one. 

Lux Eterna (Gaspar Noe, 2019): 3.5/5

Fresh off the relatively commercial and unanimous success of CLIMAX, Noe returns to his more experimental and boundary-pushing roots with Lux Eterna, a metafictional chamber-piece set in the most hellish of places — a film shoot. A claustrophobic work that sees Noe riff off De Palma’s split-screen and reference the canonical fixtures of theological and exploitation cinema, Lux Eterna interrogates both the troubled artistic visions of cinema’s many auteurs as well as the dysfunctions of a production whose social and commercial realities, sadly, will always possess a frictive relationship with the former. An intriguing and nauseating piece from a perpetual iconoclast.

Candyman (Nia DaCosta, 2021): 2.5/5

CANDYMAN was a mixed bag of sweets and sours for me. Enjoyed Nia DaCosta’s haunting atmosphere, striking camerawork, the dark score and powerfully disturbing themes. But the economically rushed storytelling resulted in dull characters, a disjointed narrative and a messy examination of its many ideas.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard, 2005): 2.5/5

Roman Duris: I've always found him insufferable and bland. And the whole which-parent-should-I-emulate? business (Mom, now dead, was a renowned pianist; Dad is a slumlord who goads his son into collecting his debts) is irritatingly facile. The film's strength resides largely in isolated moments of somber beauty and quiet grace, epitomized by the lovely, diffident relationship that gradually develops between our protagonist and his Vietnamese piano tutor (Linh-Dan Pham), who doesn't speak a word of French. 

I haven't seen Toback's FINGERS.

A Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski, 2016): 2/5

 Bloated, meandering, senseless. Real potential with editing though. This is pretty but for the most part banally so, all typically weird asymmetry, at least until a few climactic scenes, and it doesn't feel like even Verbinski cares about its endless convolutions.

I've Loved You So Long (Phillipe Claudel, 2008): 3/5

Claps to KST, her French films are better than her British ones.

All Good Things (Andrew Jarecki, 2010): 2.5/5

The only good thing about this is that it brought us THE JINX.