I had planned to rewatch Mulholland Drive on the anniversary of its premiere at Cannes, which in my mind was May 17th 2001. Then I found out last night that the premiere was actually on May 16th. By that point it was too late, but never one to let a technicality get in the way I decided I would forge ahead this morning anyway.
Mulholland Drive has been my favourite film since probably my second or third viewing, where most…
The problem with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is that I can't really talk about it without talking about my dad. I've started this review in my head several times over trying to figure out how to talk around the subject, but I don't think it's going to be possible. So, you can look at the score and bail now, confident that you know I love this film (and I do love this film), or if you like,…
Around halfway through The Burning I remembered I'd watched it before and had somehow forgotten its existence. No surprise really, it's a derivative slasher which borrows any tricks it has from better movies of the period like Halloween and Friday the 13th. Watching did make me appreciate the difference a good creative team can make, however. Here, instead of Debra Hill's incisive and realistic teen girl dialogue, we get long silent scenes of a young woman showering so we can…
My favourite Oshima so far also turns out to be his most approachable by far. After the political black comedy of Death By Hanging and the Godardian confrontation of Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, I wasn't quite sure what to expect next, but I certainly wasn't anticipating a relatively quiet drama that put me more in mind of Kore-eda than anything New Wave-adjacent.
Not that the film isn't politically charged. It's quite notably set during the postwar period of Japan's…
There's a point early on where young Joanne tells her ginger friend Sean that he's "so weaselly". It doesn't get better from there.
There's no insight into Rowling's writing process, and the stuff about her personal life has no dramatic heft because it's all skipped over in the name of cramming an entire Wikipedia article into 82 minutes.
Nothing works here. I don't remember the last time I saw a film this shoddily made.
I bought this as a joke…
Sinners is a whole lot of movie. A vampire movie, yes, exactly as marketed. But it's also a big crowdpleasing action blockbuster, a drama about the black experience in the Jim Crow south, and a foot-stomping Delta blues musical; all wrapped up in one bursting at the seams package. Admittedly, not all of this I can speak to. Let's face it, I'm a white guy from the other side of the Atlantic, everything I've learned about Jim Crow and sharecropping…
