If you think I’m going to work up the energy necessary to convey the power of this movie in a stupid Letterboxd review I’m not even being paid to write, you’ve got another thing coming.
Clint made this, and then he made Absolute Power right after. I’m not saying he’s John Ford, but I am saying that he is the closest thing to John Ford we still have. His death will be a catastrophe for the art of cinema.
The American Dream may be dead, but at least we have the road, which strikes me as cold comfort. A bit of a chore to sit through, with lots of shots of Frances McDormand gazing into the distance against the sunset in various vast desert landscapes. People have said that the depiction of the Amazon warehouse is soft, but it still probably looks pretty awful to the film's target audience of Academy Award voters. A worker at the Amazon warehouse…
This is it, folks. This is the movies. And they don't make 'em better.
The early scene between Bogart and Claude Rains where they spend four or five minutes just laying out the whole movie - the stakes, the players, their motivations, their possible hidden motivations - without it ever seeming like a clunky exposition dump... folks, that's just top-class directing, screenwriting, and acting. That's what peak performance looks like.
As my gf observed shortly after the devastating Paris flashback,…
