4o3v2h

i haven't read the book, but given its flashbacks, need for an entire town, and the particularity of its mythological realism, can imagine this being a real challenge to adapt. that said, Aja keeps it grounded and visually interesting throughout. Were I 4–8 years younger when this came out, I probably would have seen it in theaters three or four times.

Some great elements in here that don’t quite add up to anything worth committing to, but it has me interested in its inspiration, a film called Garde à vue. I think that’s because it’s attempting to do something formally experimental with the genre, like The Pledge, but doesn’t quite have the mise-en-scene to get you inside the characters. For Freeman or Hackman completists, eh sure, but for Bellucci completists, a must.

Fuzzy motivations and a bogus soundtrack mar this otherwise serviceable hacker thriller whose heart is in the right place (open source & friendship defeat Bill Gates). Very silly ending with lots of double crosses. Tim Robbins and Ryan Philippe are both compelling, as is the production designer who decided to line the office walls with cool boards, going from wakeboards to snowboards to surfboards (cool to coolest), and set the stage for frutiger aero. It’s basically halfway between The Skulls and The Firm. Less cool than Hackers but somehow more entertaining than Sneakers.

I don't think I'd ever listened to Pavement before Lauren whisked me away to the "Pavement musical" in December '22. And I don't think I fully understood it either, but I enjoyed what I saw and heard by the end. Fast forward another two years (of no listening to Pavement either, mind you) where Lauren was doing the Q+A for the Pavements doc. Imagine my surprise upon discovering that the entire musical was created just to include in the documentary, along with a rock biopic featuring real hollywood stars, and a museum show... Look I've said it before, but the best way to engage with art is more art. Biographers and "thing understanders" on notice--this is that film. Less an attempt to even tell the story of Pavement than to capture what they are, which is inscrutable, funny, sarcastic, sincere, singular, cool Gen-X geek brat geniuses? Maybe. They just seem like they're having fun. This is that film.

Fancy but far from engrossing, a rare L for Roberts who is uncharacteristically listless amid all the bells and whistles.

Is this not the scariest movie of its time?

I love this movie and it took a rewatch to remind me of how much of an impact it has had on my relationship to the fantasy genre, but the first two acts are Jabberwocky tonally, owing largely to an unserious / inconsistently motivated Merlin and an uncharismatic young Arthur. The last act, however, fixes both of these things and is just about the best sword and sorcery ever put to screen (the original berserk animated series notwithstanding).

forgive me for saying I didn't know song and dance were capable of this. I still think that's true, making this all the more miraculous.

rare case of a movie where I didn't care about what happened, at all whatsoever, but I still enjoyed being there. the Stratton case is foreshadowed but it fits in as part of the greater shift this film portends, the real end of the free love that came with birth control and went with the AIDS crisis. with that on the horizon, who cares what happens in the meantime? You just want to see them enjoying what they've got.

Absolutely unbelievable. Frequently does things with color, blocking, and diegetic sound that feel evolutionary for not just the genre but the medium. This is Heat levels of good, and future rewatches will confirm this.

In a cooler dimension, Downey Sr. commands the same respect and adoration as Jodorowsky

Most of this film is like an extremely stupid guy’s version of Possession but also Mulholland Drive, and then out of nowhere it has one of the best endings of all time.

Cute and well acted

Like The New Yorker’s Southland Tales, this suck-rocks in ways that must be seen to be believed.

All the sickest movies are about friendship

I was loving it until that 🙄 dance scene. Claire Denis, Leos Carax, neither are for me. The only one I really like is Another Round which feels like a different thing, idk if I can put my finger on why, maybe just because I like it.

All detective stories are psychodramas and this one hooked me the moment they put the new police station inside the old movie theater. Echoes of Tarkovsky and Kiyoshi Kurosawa and even Sean Penn’s The Pledge, with style and discernment to boot. Big shouts to Criterion for having this for me,.

Didn’t realize how much David Lynch references this

Virtuosic filmmaking that makes it feel cool to be here and now. Small yet huge. Sprawling yet straightforward. Of its time, but grazing the transcendent, which is crazy to say about a film shot on iPhones and about 69 other digital eyeballs of various rinkydinkiness. Calling it screen cinema feels like a disservice. If you can’t enjoy this movie, I have serious doubts about your love for the movies in general. Do you really love them for what they are, or do you watch them to have something over people? No judgments, but it’d be good to ask yourself if this doesn’t make you feel alive.

Uniquely disarming, and as a former (REFORMED) Vice fuckboy, illuminates truthfully the un-self aware American exceptionalism that powered a now-bygone era and section of the culture industry. Yet it does so with sincerity and an open heart rather than cynicism and satire, and optimism, too, that this so-called “Third Word” will continue to exist without us, with catastrophic environmental problems of its own. That the film in ing mentions protests, police violence, nationalized homophobia, et Al, without POINTING THE FINGER is a thing of grace and care. I wouldn’t even call this an “artist film,” although Ulman’s understanding of the gaze and how its politics unfold within the frame are apparent. It’s an indie movie, and it’s funny, sad, sweet, and beautiful. Never all at once, but in equal measure.

Everybody was laughing by the end, and I have to it that the best time I had was making fun of it afterwards. Look, I’ll be the first person to tell you that grief produces some pretty fucking bad screenplays, but my heart goes out to all the cinebros who thought the new Cronenberg might gain them entrée into a panoply of freaky and gooey new holes and then had to explain no, it’s not supposed to be a joke. Replete with awkward, stilted framing, redundant, on the nose dialogue, no structural direction, and a clear paper trail that suggests a producer who promised old David a lot more than he could produce, this may be his worst yet. The Safdie bros, who I have my own thoughts about, formally put Cronenberg to bed when they opened their movie inside their protagonist’s colon. I think the moment an auteur starts casting lead actors who look like themselves but hotter, some type of cinematic conservator has to step in and protect their legacy. As body horror goes, the hot dog I had while watching this was more satisfying, and it was stale.

Crucial representation for women no one likes for some reason but it would be mean to try and put your finger on it

A couple jokes, and production design that suggests we can still build fantastical spaces without the use of CGI… The way this could have worked is if they used adult actors playing themselves as kids a La Pen15. As it stands, this is a kids’ movie full of references directed at people who post about how glad they are to not have kids lol

Damn, this is amazing! Establishes itself as a familiar western, then immediately flips the script by turning into a different western, then progressively changes course another 2 or 3 times, becoming less and less recognizable as the landscape becomes more barren and less hospitable. In that way, are we the brutes in Brune’s gang, lurking around for sex violence and a payout? If so, then Blaze is a stand-in for de Toth, leading us to the edge of genre itself, the outer limits, before carrying us gently back to friendly territory with a new lease on life and a great tale.

Effectively just watching someone answer text messages for an hour and a half, but if I could pinpoint what the audience connected with it’s the idea of a DoorDash assassination. What could have raised the stakes authentically while building character is if you swapped out the tasteless and generic pseudo-therapy-abuse stuff with a central couple who were personality-incompatible. Like she hates this douche but has to keep the date going, and maybe she’s awful too. As it stands, her “grounded” status as a former victim of serious domestic violence just motivates the fact that she can really take a beating, which is offensive.

This review may contain spoilers.

Headache-inducingly mopey and boring despite basically being the Fire in the Sky of Satanic Ritual Abuse movies. At its heart is a sober PSA about the dangers of regression therapy, which is like, what attracted The Weinstein Company to that?, but in order to turn the pages it features cult figures in hoods killing babies, which is like, why not just make that? The problem is that trying to do both necessitates a protagonist who is inconsistently intelligent (which you can do, but not without giving him a reason to be; drugs, alcohol, past trauma, whatevs). The resulting flatlander falls for a victim’s story, then has to apologize in the last few minutes, which is interesting for its eschewing of Hollywood structure norms, but also means you have to believe this guy is both an adept detective and exceedingly gullible/stupid. Pick one! Cuz you can watch it vacillate back and forth across Hawke’s face, especially when the real victim, the accused, decides to stay in jail for incestuous child molestation he didn’t commit in the end? Uhhhhh. Anyway I will say, I’m surprised more of you haven’t seen this, even though it stinks.

Amidst a swirling miasma of junk no one asked for, we find two impressive performances from the girls and a bunch of iconographic SFX makeup we don’t get enough of.

Funny macabre and atmospheric meta horror romp with canny performances that goes down real easy in the Tales From the Crypt vein. Not nerdy or self important, which is the most important part of why this works. Would make an awesome stage play! Keep this in the back pocket for October.

Julian Sands remains captivating as an unstoppable force with a boundlessly creative spirit, the franken-structure is postmodern and novel, and the CG-graphics are totally charming. All I need!

awful vibes, hypnotically forgettable, hard to pinpoint why it is just so bad, but this is some of the worst detective horror i have ever seen. nevertheless, Jonas Akerlund's wife B. nails the costume design, and everyone's outfits look really good on them. one thing that is consistently funny is that they clearly shot this in Winnipeg during the peak of winter, meaning everyone just looks so cold. there's a scene where Ziyi Zhang and Dennis Quaid have to do a walk-n-talk through a four-foot snow bank and they are miserable. almost worth it for that scene alone.

Still very fun but kind of lost me early on when the jailhouse tough says “I want a piece of your white yuppie ass” and the Wishmaster doesn’t give it to him.

Tight as fuck, consistently surprising, with impressive effects and extremely fun performances

A welcome entry into a tired genre that couldn’t have been pulled off without the breadth of experience of both its writer/director and the entire cast. Zigs where lesser neo-noirs would zag, dismisses the “no one uses ugly / character actors” debate, and pulls off both with style and sincerity. A sturdy movie if ever there was one.

I’ll watch anything with a woman in it

What it lacks in sense-making it more than makes up for in awful, horrible vibes

Clearly illustrates the difference between an actor and a director; whereas it is the actor’s job to feel and embody without judgment, it’s the director’s job to control exactly how the audience feels about every character across every scene. In this case, the actors are free to feel, to emote, and they do; but how those emotions are received on the other side of the screen lacks a director’s sense of discretion and discernment. It’s a raw nerve, but not a vital one.

Watched on Tuesday April 1, 2025.

WOW! Feels like nothing I’ve seen before from this era, like auteur cinema before it had to be “a thing” and could just be called style, like proto-von trier, this is what it’s all about!!!

My dream is to do a Once Upon a Time In Hollywood: 2000s Version so I can alter history to save Brittany Murphy

Inspiring, great energy, wish it didn’t adhere to the inspo Easy Rider beats though- “you’re cool just the way you are” situ. One thing I think is funny is how certain foreign films have background cultural context that you need to know to fully grasp, and in this case it was that but with turn of the century grad school. Realized midway that I have a pitifully scant frame of reference for that, and it must have been a remarkable time to be in grad school.

Liked everything except for the Lego product placement Gremlin. What was up with that speech about being traumatized in the park by a guy who looks like Abraham Lincoln though? Was that a reference to the first one?

Not to be a total John Ganz about it but there is something to be said about this film’s treatment of American intervention as a kind of benevolent necessity if (and only if) the capital remains localized, which changes context in the edited version that features Harry Dean Stanton giving him an assignment to go rectify things in that town yonder. Especially given this film production’s treatment of capital—as intellectual property—one wonders whether The Man With No Name enters a kind of new frontier of the mind when he doesn’t take the money at the end and moves along. When someone tells him to go, and he refuses the money, he’s a representation of law and order. But when he goes for the money and leaves without it, he becomes something the American mind cannot comprehend.

Hard to talk about this without overflowing with awe and iration. I still believe in movies and art, but this makes the compelling case that it’s all been downhill since ‘68.

Design was great, definitely took me to some places I’ve never been, and if you look past the empty liberalisms like the red hats and saving the world by making a black lady cop president, and Toni Collette’s unfortunate descent into pastiche (a24 mustn’t be forgiven for their role in this), there’s actually a cool message about how things might be better if people sacrificed themselves to kill billionaires. Among his myriad talents, Pattinson proves himself worthy of comparisons to both Buster Keaton and Klaus Kinski, but this is his second film, with The Lighthouse, that would be far better positioned for actual boys 8-14, rather than men of that emotional age. I said it when I saw the trailer and I’m now confirming my prognosis: live action feature length Rick and Morty episode. (In a good way.) Still the best film in this realm remains Edge of Tomorrow.

Look, no one’s here to doubt the technical mastery that allows a film like this to come into being, but to what end? Some of the silliest looking visuals and dialogue ever recorded.

Truffaut slow-jerkin’ in the auditorium type shit—a true movie lover’s movie

Like a rougher tougher 48 Hours or Midnight Run- oozes style and deconstructs bromance in a way Hollywood could never imagine let alone commit to

powerfully compelling sci-fi-cum-art experiment from some guys you know read Acéphale and saw Testament of Mabuse and were more interested in making something new than, like, regurgitating man vs machine tropes. watched it on a screen with its own weird glitches that made it even more transient. I think my favorite part is that just the premise forces you to watch it with a heightened awareness of the trickery of images, which not only makes for a productive viewing experience, but is a reminder that reproduced images, sound, etc. are all inherently fabricated and we have gotten far too comfortable for far too long by trusting them. pictures should force you to negotiate with them, as this is healthy for both parties involved.

ecstatic, and i don't mean to overstate, but actors, when firing like this, make a case for being the most important artists

Goodnight, mooned my ass faster than a cuppa celestial seasonings. No starz, cuz I only made it halfway, but this must be way scarier as a captive patron whose money’s on the line, while being less scary but more interesting on a screen at home because of the added layer of digital pixels. That tertiary mediation enhances the interior geometries’ concave/convex illusions, I could leave certain frames on like a nightlight. I’m all for seeing something like this as video art, but would need it to be saying more, at least give the camera moves more logic/motivation, ya know? anyway, congrats on a zillion dollars (earnest), i hope some of that went to the filmmakers lol. Writing this out makes me wish I had just kept watching family guy tho

Essential sad unsettling femcel and d cinema. Suggestions welcomed!

• 3 Women
• Romance
• Single White Female
• In the Cut
• Amateur
• Ghost World
• Strangers with Candy
• Wanda
• Young Adult
• s Ha

...plus 48 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I guess it’s PoMo, Memphis, Gen-X Production designers, neo-Deco, the 80s in general (you can help me come up with better descriptors), but here are some movies that look like the world I, as a kid, hoped I’d get to enjoy. Instead we got flat illustration and cleanbeards and sneakerheads and Bonobos and graphic tees that cost $125

• Trouble in Mind
• Choose Me
• Cool World
• Wild Palms
• Slam Dance
• Forbidden Zone
• Toys
• Clifford
• Monkeybone
• Nightbreed

...plus 52 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Nation versus Nation…People killing people…isn’t that NUTS?!?! 🤪😵‍💫😗🤯 cross-genre comedies about war being kiiind of like the circus

• King of Hearts
• The Ninth Configuration
• The Story of... The Day the Clown Cried
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Catch-22
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• M*A*S*H
• Life Is Beautiful
• 1941
• To Be or Not to Be

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Homie is definitely not gonna make it

• Midnight Cowboy
• Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
• Scarecrow
• A Scene at the Sea
• In the Soup
• Lonely Are the Brave
• Cool Hand Luke
• Man from Reno
• Untamed Heart
• Foxes

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Thanks to everyone who contributed! Instagram.com/freemovieideas

1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. The Birdcage
3. Crimson Tide
4. Mississippi Burning
5. Superman
6. French Connection II
7. The French Connection
8. Behind Enemy Lines
9. The Replacements
10. Scarecrow

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

i asked the Idealists of Free Movie Ideas which movies they thought were about or concerning men's mental health, here are their/your suggestions

• Husbands
• Fight Club
• Frailty
• Take Shelter
• Head-On
• Buffalo Soldiers
• American Sniper
• A Beautiful Mind
• You Were Never Really Here
• Good Will Hunting

...plus 101 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films that attempt to depict the movement, flow, and consequences of global capital

• The International
• Boarding Gate
• The Mattei Affair
• Blackhat
• The Constant Gardener
• Can't Get You Out of My Head
• Demonlover
• Carlos
• Gomorrah
• Collateral

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I’d love to know what was goin on in the 90s, specifically ‘99. Were execs trying to score one with the big man before the new millennium?

• Dogma
• Stigmata
• The Devil's Advocate
• The Prophecy
• End of Days
• Michael
• Constantine
• The Believers
• Saved!
• Fallen

...plus 51 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

“Within an otherwise flawed, forgettable movie, Campion has managed to offer a vivid, if fleeting, glimpse of the wariness, self-deception and fear that shadow so many illicit thrills of sex in the city.”

The only specific restriction is “not horror” sorry

• The New York Ripper
• In the Cut
• Cruising
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Dog Day Afternoon
• Bad Lieutenant
• Belly
• Ms .45
• Gone Girl
• Sea of Love

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Life during wartime. The 21st century has devolved or accelerated into total war, the atomized I against I. Here are some movies that capture the feeling of it. I am trying to stay away from genre films as they tend to get away from the feeling of the now, but some of them will inevitably apply. Actually, you know what this is? Americans pulling guns on each other over usually for things they don’t need in a way that feels distinctly post 9/11. Good ones only.

• I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
• Riders of Justice
• Joe
• Spree
• Running on Empty
• Zero Dark Thirty
• American Sniper
• Red Road
• Four Lions
• Edmond

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies about digging a hole into the center of or through the earth. Did you know we’ve only ever gotten 1/10th of the way there? Crazy. Anyway, give me suggestions

• Nine Miles Down
• The Core
• At the Earth's Core
• Antrum
• Magic in the Water
• Godzilla vs. Kong
• Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Journey to the Centre of the Earth

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Did I already make this list? Does it matter? Feel free to make suggestions either way!

• Zeroville
• The Canyons
• Body Double
• Inland Empire
• Reflections of Evil
• Fatal Pulse
• Hurlyburly
• Wild Palms
• Maps to the Stars
• Last Action Hero

...plus 31 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Unbelievable loser shit

• mother!
• The Dark Knight Rises
• Enter the Void
• Love
• Climax
• Shark Tale
• Collateral Beauty
• Spring Breakers
• Bully
• Babylon

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies that Cool Xers have kept cool that uncool Xers don’t know (or gatekeep)

• Desert Blue
• S.F.W.
• Pump Up the Volume
• The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre
• Freeway
• The Opposite of Sex
• Citizen Ruth
• Shocker
• Office Killer
• Tape

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Just to be clear: I don’t want to know what brutalism is, just whether or not these films are. Yes or no

• Naked
• Ghosts... of the Civil Dead
• The Parallax View
• Point Blank
• Tempest
• A Zed & Two Noughts
• The Offence
• Red Road
• The Apartment
• Wings of Desire

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

“A Temporary Autonomous Zone is a liberated area of land, time or imagination where one can be for something, not just against, and where new ways of being human together can be explored and experimented with. Locating itself in the cracks and fault lines in the global grid of control and alienation, a T.A.Z. is an eruption of free culture where life is experienced at maximum intensity. It should feel like an exceptional party where for a brief moment our desires are made manifest and we all become the creators of the art of everyday life.”

• King of Hearts
• The Dark Knight Rises
• World on a Wire
• The Matrix
• Phase IV
• Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
• Last Action Hero
• Dogville
• Manderlay
• Synecdoche, New York

...plus 49 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

defiling a corpse robs a man of his virility but a woman doing it gives her agency. if the male gaze is at living flesh then the female gazes over the dead.

• Nekromantik
• Nekromantik 2
• The Undertaker
• Clerks
• Guinea Pig: Mermaid in the Manhole
• Corpse Bride
• 10 Rillington Place
• American Psycho
• Cemetery Man
• In the Realm of the Senses

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies featuring mass shootings at the movies

• Anguish
• Targets
• Dudes
• God Bless America
• The Sweet East

In progress, taking suggestions! 

Movies that feature a superstar coming face to face with the fabric/nature of reality. If their performances are truthful, does it not stand to reason that they’ve experienced a glimpse of the shape of things? Do they carry it with them? If so, is it that they’re incapable of sharing? For what deficiency?

• Hypnotic
• Serenity
• Don't Worry Darling
• The Matrix
• The Fountain
• Lucy
• Inception
• A Beautiful Mind
• The Truman Show
• What Dreams May Come

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Rest stops & roadside attractions

• UFOria
• Melvin and Howard
• Desert Blue
• Tremors
• White of the Eye
• Natural Born Killers
• The Sunchaser
• The Electric Horseman
• Flirting with Disaster
• Dudes

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

You now have to pronounce the slash

• They/Them
• Face/Off
• 50/50
• V/H/S
• Self/less
• Victor/Victoria
• F/X
• 8½
• Frost/Nixon
• .hack

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

fun thing: TIL about something called "yetzer hara," the "congenital inclination to do evil, by violating the will of God." According to wikipedia, "According to the Talmudic tractate Avot de-Rabbi Natan, a boy's evil inclination is greater than his good inclination until he turns 13 (bar mitzvah), at which point the good inclination is "born" and able to control his behavior." so basically growing up is unholy.

sourced lovingly from the idealists at instagram dot com slash freemovieideas

• The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
• We Need to Talk About Kevin
• The Good Son
• Thirteen
• The Shining
• Chronicle
• Jennifer's Body
• Heathers
• The Lovely Bones
• Rosemary's Baby

...plus 98 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Day of Wrath
• Guinea Pig Part 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood
• Guinea Pig: Mermaid in the Manhole
• Nekromantik
• Nekromantik 2
• Witchfinder General
• Alucarda
• Messiah of Evil
• Inferno
• To the Devil a Daughter

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies where smell/scent plays a significant role

• The Silence of the Lambs
• Phantom Thread
• Branded to Kill
• Scent of a Woman
• Parasite
• The Third Man
• Memories
• Pig
• Rosemary's Baby
• The Color of Money

apocalyptic visions of the elements (earth, fire, wind, water, heart)

• The Last Wave
• Born of Fire
• Dust Devil
• Phase IV
• August in the Water
• Gummo
• Woman in the Dunes

Journalists suck lol

• Ace in the Hole
• Absence of Malice
• The Parallax View
• Medium Cool
• Natural Born Killers
• Salvador
• Elmer Gantry
• Celebrity
• Sweet Smell of Success

• Seven Beauties
• The Night Porter
• Europa
• The Conformist
• Mr. Klein
• Black Book

Movies in which a phonograph is successfully used as a token of courtship

• Blood Feud
• Out of Africa