“I remember images from your films.
Cleo’s face.
Mur Murs in Los Angeles.
Those giant murals made such an impression on me,”
Says artist JR to Agnes at the beginning of Faces Places.

Agnes Varda approaches the world with compassionate curiosity, ready to turn over every stone and exhaust every angle in the name of discovery. Intimacy of emotion is celebrated through cinema. In her films Mur Murs and Faces Places, muralists are making the banal extraordinary in LA and…

Al Pacino — who presumably was cast as a nod to Dog Day Afternoon, from which this film pulls influence — makes some inappropriate performance decisions, especially given he is supposed to be a Midwestern businessman in the '70s. More importantly though, it was apparent pretty early into his screen time that we were not going to see him out of a chair.

I actually think many of the performances don't work, not feeling era, region, or class specific. Much…

Made me feel similar to how I felt after “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”: Slightly befuddled and very impressed.

Look, and here’s the thing, I’m bad at visual metaphor. Does that put me at a disadvantage as a cinephile (I prefer cinnamonphile)? Yes. But like, not everything should be treated like a puzzle and I certainly don’t need to treat it that way. I take what I can and land in the camp of the unpleasantly confounded or…

I was so excited by the editing of Perfect Days. In its moment to moment cutting it seemed to know exactly when to move forward with a continuity cut and when to "jump" forward in time. But I was particularly struck by the structural editing, that by choosing to spend so much time on the details of our first day with Hirayama (a terrific Kōji Yakusho) that it (re)enforces the habit/routine/ritual of his life. From then on the editing could…