Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model (Mor Loushy, Daniel Sivan, 2026): 2/5

Holy FUCK I don’t have the emotional energy for this right now. Moral of the story being the 00’s and early 2010’s were awful to women from slut shaming (sexual assault) to body image (size 6 is obese).

"But the public wanted more!"

“The public” was 16 years old, Tyra.

Also, is Tyra Banks an evil genius/pathological expert at deflection and self victimizing OR a casualty of an uncaring industry, unknowingly perpetuating the same cycles of exploitation she herself once endured?

I don't know, and apparently neither do the filmmakers.

Ahed's Knee (Nadav Lapid, 2021): 3/5

This is a fine "I need to get out of the city and yell about how angry I am about Israel's politics" film. Nadav Lapid letting loose here; not the best film, kept me at a distance with some editing choices, but there are a few excellent speeches he unleashes about how dishonest everything is in Israel, how people are afraid of hearing the truth. All packed within a meta story about a filmmaker who wants to say things he can't say because he'll get in trouble for telling the truth.

rewatched Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008): 4.5/5

"Martyrs are exceptional people. They survive pain, they survive total deprivation. They bear all the sins of the earth. They give themselves up. They transcend themselves...they are transfigured. [...] But there are only victims left."

First rewatch since 2011 and I completely forgot how the film doesn't let you ever catch a break, like at all.

Leigh's Hot Take: this is a love story.

The Assassin (Hou hsiao hsien, 2015): 2.5/5

Sustained on beauty for about half its runtime, until Hou's utter disinterest in compelling dramaturgy or depicting a fight scene clearly drained me. That opening title card though? Rapturous.

964 Pinocchio (Shozin Fukui, 1991): 1.5/5

Time to admit I'm not a fan of Japanese cyberpunk.

In My Skin (Marina de Van, 2002): 2/5

God forbid a girl has a hobby…

A softer side of the New French Extremity movement. Wouldn't rank it too highly either. (We just know so little about the character of Esther so it's hard to decipher her motivation or why she gets so obsessed with self-mutilation/cannibalism.)

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke, 2024): 5/5

“If you love until it hurts, then you cannot hurt anymore. You can only love more.”

Thank you, Therapy Robot at the Shopping Mall.

Just stunning, immense, and poignant. This is not a film for decoding. It’s one you let wash over you, let it rearrange your molecules a bit. Jia has crafted something that feels genuinely unprecedented here, a decades-spanning meditation that functions less like traditional narrative and more like watching time itself learn how to work through its past to better dream of a future.

And Zhao Tao, man. Jesus Christ. Zhao Tao and her silent symphony as Qiao Qiao. She carries entire emotional universes in her silence, embodying the specific kind of hurt that comes from loving something - or someone - that keeps disappearing on you. Whether that’s her abandoning lover Guo Bin or China itself feels deliberately ambiguous. The way she processes being left behind mirrors how entire communities get left behind by rapid modernization. She’s dealing with the macro and micro simultaneously—the boyfriend who vanished and the homeland that keeps shape-shifting beneath her feet.

And that final moment when she finally speaks - shouting as she joins those mysterious nighttime joggers - hit me like a freight train. Throughout the film, her muteness felt almost mythical, like she was this silent witness to history. But that shout - whether it’s her rejecting Guo Bin for good or just asserting her right to exist on her own terms - feels like the sound of someone finally claiming their voice after decades of observation.

In the end, maybe it's about being a regular person, "caught by the tides" of history - just like everybody else. We cannot avoid the rising tides -- but at the very least, we can learn to swim.

BOOK NOOK (or is that too precious?)

The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosinski, 1965)

"Against the background of bland colors he projected an unfadable blackness. In a world of men with harrowed faces, with smashed eyes, bloody, bruised and disfigured limbs, among the fetid, broken human bodies, of which I had already seen so many, he seemed an example of neat perfection that could not be sullied: the smooth, polished skin of his face, the bright golden hair showing under his peaked cap, his pure metal eyes. Every movement of his body seemed propelled by some tremendous internal force. The granite sound of his language was ideally suited to order the death of inferior, forlorn creatures. I was stung by a twinge of envy I had never experienced before, and I admired the glittering death's-head and crossbones that embellished his tall cap. I thought how good it would be to have such a gleaming and hairless skull instead of my Gypsy face which was so feared and disliked by decent people. The officer surveyed me sharply. I felt like a squashed caterpillar oozing in the dust, a creature that could not harm anyone yet aroused loathing and disgust. In the presence of such a resplendent being, armed in all the symbols of might and majesty, I was genuinely ashamed of my appearance. I had nothing against his killing me."

Unflinching work about a lesser told story of WWII with scenes of unimaginable horror and brutality. Prose was beautiful though and moving. Apparently this book was canned after scholars/literary circles realized Kosinski lied about it being autobiographical.