Letterboxd — Your life in film

I actually enjoyed this way more than I thought I would: one of the better ‘light’ (e.g. product-first) superhero movies. The entire thing feels like it’s trying to keep up with and edit around the Ezra Miller controversies, but it’s a remarkably well-paced two and a half hours, all things considered — all the usual issues for this fare and it’s not ‘good’ per se but it is Muschietti’s best film (though the bar is low). I really wish somebody would…

B-grade horror that really works. I really appreciated the workmanlike formal beauty of this as Savage does exactly the right amount with every moment. There’s a lot of really beautiful play with intermittent lighting and strobe effects and the creature design is great. This also takes a lot of cues from late Hooper, but unfortunately it doesn’t quite have the same nastiness or romance of Hooper’s third acts, and that final act is fairly poorly paced. The first hour goes off like…

if acting is a form of persecution then what does it mean to act as a fully realised individual, to act as yrself, to try to comprehend yr own self as more than an amalgam of body parts moving in or out of sync? how do u act when the act of existence is actually a persecution in itself? what does it mean to be or not be fighting against yr own self, yr own self intruding upon yr private…

Mrs. Davis is completely hermetic, a Damon Lindelof Rube Goldberg Machine being placed over and around Tara Hernandez's ideas. The basic thrust of this is solid and it has numerous moment-to-moment pleasures, but it's definitely the weakest project that Lindelof has ever been attached to, yet another representation of the present cultural ouroboros, yet another kind of vaguely-interesting-thing swimming up its own ass, yet another attempt at corporate gloss and drumming up massive short-term interest in something so idiosyncratically "marketable"…

Most of this is just dire but the pre-credits has a great handle on semiotics — the opening shot acts as a literal commercial ‘gaze’ (the new invisible hand?) and the sequence then works to associate Momoa with this gaze. The villain is then literally money, money disguised as a man. In this sense it is almost Feuilladian. The rest of the movie kinda sucks, but the last fifteen minutes ties back to the opening in an interesting way. I…

Impressed by this nasty, mostly flippant film that situates itself as a Chekhov's carnival ride above all else. It's very effective when it matters, and very funny when it matters also, with extremely little fat. I could have done without the prologue/epilogue framing storyline (even if it did mean I got to see a couple of familiar NZ-actor faces on screen) but everything else here is gold. The high rise is built on top of a colonial artefact, because of…

the kind of movie that regularly makes you go 'what the fuck is wrong with Ari Aster?' also the living embodiment of that meme that's like 'tragedy! the worst person you know just made a good point.' also the kind of movie that almost provokes you to write an extended essay about how Ari Aster's career is starting to answer some of the lingering art-historical questions about the functionality of postmodernism as a device for earnestness, but ultimately leaves you…

It’s been a very, very long road for me and Hereditary to get to this point, where I’m giving it the full five stars. The broad affect of the film, its imperfections and its logical inconsistencies remain notable — I have written about these in previous reviews.

But its scandalousness is undeniable now. The audacity of it all. The cruelty in the setup at the close of that first act, the bravery of that choice (you know the one) and the…