Letterboxd — Your life in film

Supposed to be on holiday and I am on holiday but I’m also thinking about where he goes, why he goes, why she can’t help him, I’m thinking of every man I know and love who I’ve seen like this, every little holiday that feels so plain and so un special, every video you think is too much, every photo that becomes the only thing you have left. And I’m thinking about how hard it is to make anyone feel…

The film begins as a beefy legal drama only to unravel and become instead a character study of one Roman J. Israel, Esq., a socially-awkward savant type who sees the law as an avenue for social change. Ever the eternal optimist, ever the martyr, fighting the good fight against the tyranny of systemic injustice. Roman is an everyday MLK, a true social activist who has devoted his life to change, but then, the film takes a long trek down a…

"I have to apologize... I was born with a disfigurement where my head is made of the same material as the sun."

one of the only love stories in recent memory that actually *does* make sense. certain films are often (and lazily) described as the kind of thing that you need to see twice, but it truly is sadistically cruel that the end of this film doesn’t immediately loop around to the beginning… not to plug holes, but to heal…

Though sold as a romantic sci-fi film, Upstream Color is in truth closer to a Cronenberg picture than Spike Jonze's Her. Often times disturbing, owing to some play at body horror but more to do with the unsettling commitment to a completely alien existence that's apart from our own — like if the uncanny valley was thoroughly mapped and then visualized. Shane Carruth's uncompromisingly obfuscating indie sci-fi film is destined for cult status, much too patient and cryptic for typical…

Suzume is best described as a Miyazaki film done in the style of Makoto Shinkai. The photo-realistic animation is a given, but here, it is employed as a function of a larger story and not sold plainly on the merits of its visuals. Shinkai borrows from both his early works and his current oeuvre, creating a fantasy-first coming-of-age romance about a bubbly teenager coming to terms with the trauma of her past, and along the way, become an unlikely heroine…

What happens when you remove hope from the equation? Well, Cuaron posits that humanity will quickly cease to exist. To be without hope is to live a life without a future, and what a meaningless existence that is. Children of Men sees a world where hopes have been dashed by infertility, the last child being of 18 years prior to the events of the film. The world in that time has crumbled into anarchy. Great cities in ruins, engulfed in…

Your past always catches up to you eventually, and when your past is a 6'1 hulking black man who has been watching you live out the life he's ought to have from behind bars, you get Creed III. Practically therapy for men, which in my case, works out great as two cut movie stars with an unsolved past dominate each other in a ring rather than talk out their feelings in group therapy. Michael B. Jordan fares well for a…

If it wasn't clear with Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, it certainly should be clear now that the reboot should never have happened, and definitely not in the way that it happened. Dominion has faded completely into the blockbuster vortex of its given year and with not a soul to remember. The lustre and spirit of adventure of the original, or even by extension, the original trilogy is completely lost, and in its place, a soulless replica of corporate mediocrity that…

Nearly a beat-by-beat remake of Mann's Manhunter, and when compared to that — tough not to, with the closeness of result and all — Ratner's version feels like a rushed made-for-tv filler. What both Silence of the Lambs and Manhunter gets right is the atmospheric dread and the inner turmoil of its respective leads which is the main difference between the films within the Hannibal universe that works and which doesn't. Ratner's uncertified copy cheapens the drama of its narrative,…

I don't think there can ever be a great adaptation of Dune, at least not one that successfully captures its breadth of ecological and political vision. But time has been kind to David Lynch's version, which may omit most of the meat of the text** but retains its curiously trancelike conflation of spiritual woo-woo and drug-addled vision quest. He is at his best digging into the ways that mankind's path to machine-less enlightenment might fundamentally warp our anatomy, and this…