Favorite films

More

1959

★★★★★ 4

Feels like a parallel to the Psycho of Hitchcock -- who like Renoir made his first film in 1925 -- and who 35 years later knowingly downshifted into surface level B-horror black-and-white aesthetics with the full knowledge that what exploitation filmmakers had been doing to get across cheap thrills & violence & titillation, he could do fifty times better. Renoir does something similar here with the horror / monster / mad scientist template, and like Hitchcock takes the thirty-five years of artistic…

2005

★★★★★ Rewatched 14 May 2025

Kept thinking of the lyric from Joni Mitchell's "Hejira" about "a defector from the petty wars"....
Amidst all the vague theological Hollywoodisms I think the discerning viewer can sneak something profound out of this, something that, as with any great movie, isn't something you could get from just reading the script (shout out mise-en-scene, cuts, faces, bodies, music, etc.)
Suffice it to say I will be the first person to buy a ticket to the one-night-only 2030 theatrical showing of Ridley Scott's Robin Hood extended cut

More

2020

★★★★★ 28

why do you love me?

With Fincher it always comes back to this: loneliness, plus its attendant causes and effects -- alienation and self-isolation, ambition and failure, love and disappointment, desire and loss, etc. etc. The questions of why certain people stick around and others leave when someone is who they are and does what they do. I find Mank and his wife's relationship quite moving, and as such is a great example of how Fincher subtly operates with this…

2024

★★★★★ 1

If today were like the 1950s, this would inspire a second string Cahiers critic to write an imioned multi-page piece called "Schizophrénie et l'image" or something, the film would end up #12 on the publication's year-end-list to the minor chagrin of the less radical editors, and establishment English-language critics would get a chuckle and head shake out of it when they heard the news.
M. Night in the 2020s: King of the Bs (in the guise of As)

228

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•