This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
From its very first moments, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood casts a spell over the viewer, transporting us to a time and place that feels so authentic and lived in. There are few greater thrills I get from watching a movie than the feeling of being in the hands of a master filmmaker who I know has labored over every shot with agonizing precision: every billboard, every cinema marquee, every song choice and every spoken word that blasts through…
Who knew John Krasinski had this in him? In A Quiet Place (which he wrote, directed and stars in) he creates a world that has been invaded by blind indestructible aliens with super hearing so that making the slightest noise could lead to immediate doom. It is a world so vividly created that I jumped back in my seat every time a person in the theater coughed or chewed on a piece of popcorn. Upon my second viewing, I begun…
Criterion Challenge 2022, Week #1 - Watch a movie from the year you were born (1983) letterboxd.com/asinensky/list/criterion-challenge-2022/
The most charitable thing to say about this film is that it is impeccably made and effectively creates a feeling of trepidation and claustrophobia in the viewer. But that's pretty much where my praise for it ends. I would spend time criticizing the film's story but that would suggest it has one. This movie gives a whole new meaning to the term "artsy fartsy".
Alfonso Cuaron is a master filmmaker, an expert of creating a visual aesthetic and the use of the long take (most recently in Gravity and Children of Men) and Roma just might be his masterpiece. Telling the biographical story of his childhood housekeeper in Mexico City of the early 1970s, Roma washes over its audience. Shot in an unusually sharp black and white, the film gives the viewer a sense of watching a memory, offering a hypnotic, dreamlike view of…
