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In Cold Blood 1967
Staggering, brutal, chilly, masterful adaptation of Capote's text that sacrifices some of the narrative intricacy and rich accumulation of detail but preserves the grim, uneasy structuring and deathly tone. Makes a few key changes I wasn't fond of β losing Capote's ending and revealing the killers' 'motive' too early, especially β but more than makes up for the sacrifices it has to make in its expert shifting between documentary-like realism and hallucinatory, subjective POV work that both nails the miserable unease you want from something like this and encapsulates the simultaneous factuality and unknowability of the killings at the center of the story.
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Love in the Afternoon 1972
One of the finer moral tales for its narrative simplicity and the richness of Rohmer's novelistic mode of storytelling, but also his formal approach. I'm always deeply affected by stories in which the expected climax is subverted by a sort of absence of one, as is the case here, in which at the point when we might expect the foolish man to consummate his illicit affair with the strong-willed woman he thought he could love from a distance, he walksβ¦
