Letterboxd — Your life in film

I was really excited to see this once Bo Burnham and David Ehrlich both said it was amongst their favorite movies of the year, so I went into the movie without seeing so much as a trailer. I only even saw the poster when I first walked into the theatre, and boy does that poster sell a completely different movie than what you get.

From the very first scene, I was convinced this movie was gonna be too confusing for…

Glad I saw this a second time– it’s nice to watch this without feeling the tension and just getting to try and piece together the parts of the story I didn’t understand. And to just watch it from a technical standpoint! Fuck, this was so well-made. Also there’s a specific scare that everyone was talking about that I thought I saw the first time around and passively mentioned that I didn’t think it was impressive, BUT then I saw it…

This film is getting heavier and more real as I get older, and since I’m still only 25, I expect it to properly kill me eventually. 

Jane and Aaron are made for each other, except she doesn’t love him - they have similar brains but the attraction isn’t there for her, which might be one reason why she has crying fits. Her relationship with Aaron is yet another frustrating injustice in her life, after the helpless lowering of standards in…

DISCLAIMER: I only saw 19 of the 24 frames, but each functions according to the same principle...

Kiarostami explores the power of photography via the power of film in a (too long) series of "photographs in time." I found myself at once bored and entranced, my mind racing as I tried to figure out why such simple clips made me feel so lucky to be alive. Here are blurbs about my conclusions.

A photograph captures a moment and suggests a…

A soldier, sheriff, and a criminal walk into a room—
Diametrically opposed foes!
They emerge with a homicide,
endless shots fired
while the door was nailed closed, closed!
The soldier emerges with a life-threatening injury,
bleeding out, but giving justice however he wants,
the Confederate emerges with a letter from Lincoln—
and here’s the piece de resistance…

No one else was in the room where it happened,
the room where it happened, the room where it happened—
no one else…

I loved Project Greenlight this year, in many of the same ways I wrote about in my ME AND EARL review a few days ago: as much as I disliked Jason Mann As Presented On Project Greenlight, as a sometime filmmaker myself I saw him going through the exact struggles I have faced. As the show wore on, these were less moments like "There's not enough money for film" etc., but the deeper ones. The moment on the show that…

Not a doomed love story so much as a fragile one, forever susceptible to circumstance and others' cruelty and caprice -- and it's always so, isn't it, then as now, with anything we might long for that doesn't fit into prescribed, regimented boxes. Haynes captures the rhythms of new friendship and courtship, wise to the ways they can blend into one another, the ways small gestures become charged with meaning and desire. The lush, grainy cinematography and Carter Burwell's amazing…

Until now I’ve been hopelessly ignorant. Foxcatcher reveals a deep dark secret about America, and the secret is this: this country’s legacy is founded upon an unhealthy mix of greed, wealth and megalomania. It’s truly upsetting to hear now as a citizen of this country for over two decades that there may be something evil brewing beneath the sterilized narratives of American excellence and glory portrayed in mass media. How could I have been in the dark for so long…

Nearly half of Richard Linklater’s 17 features have been shot primarily in Texas, from the faux-groggy minimalist road trip of 1988’s It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books to 2011’s Bernie, a micro-specific portrait of small-town east Texas contextualised by an illustrated lecture on “the five states” within the state.

Linklater hasn’t released a movie shot in his adopted home base of Austin since 2004, where the to-be-Rotoscoped source footage for A Scanner Darkly was filmed. Boyhood, in…

It's easy, if one only ever has to suffer a few times a year the no-budget, no-talent indies dumped on one-week NY runs and burned onto screener discs, to have a charmed view of what constitutes a bad film. Truth be told, with the number of films produced domestically exploding in recent years thanks to mass proliferation of acceptable-quality, cheap DV, it's a good bet that the vast majority of American movies made each year now consist of films made…