December 2014

December 2014

The Dead Zone (Cronenberg, 1983)|||||7
Into the Woods (Marshall, 2014)|||||5
Pitfall (De Toth, 1948)|||||7.5
HealtH (Altman, 1980)|||||6.5
Nine to Five (Higgins, 1980)|||||5
Blissfully Yours (Weerasethakul, 2002)|||||7.5
The Interview (Rogen, Goldberg, 2014)|||||4
The Day of the Jackal (Zinnemann, 1973)|||||6.5
The Homesman (Jones, 2014)|||||6.5
Inherent Vice (Anderson, 2014)|||||5.5
The Babadook (Kent, 2014)|||||5.5
Maps to the Stars (Cronenberg, 2014)|||||7
Meet the Feebles (Jackson, 1989)|||||5.5
United 93 (Greengrass, 2006)|||||5
The Wiz (Lumet, 1978)|||||3
American Movie (Smith, 1999)|||||5.5

November 2014

November 2014

Hamlet 2 (Fleming, 2008)|||||4.5
* Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983)|||||7
A Midwinter's Tale (Branagh, 1995)|||||5.5
Hair (Forman, 1979)|||||5.5
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Parajanov, 1964)|||||7.5
Floating Clouds (Naruse, 1955)|||||7.5
* Day of the Dead (Romero, 1985)|||||7
Total Recall (Verhoeven, 1990)|||||7
Satan's Cheerleaders (Clark, 1977)|||||3
From What is Before (Diaz, 2014)|||||6
Tora! Tora! Tora! (Fleischer, et al., 1970)|||||7.5
Interstellar (Nolan, 2014)|||||6.5
Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer, 1966)|||||6
Dracula (Melford, 1931)|||||4.5
More polished, but Browning's version is better. 
Birdman (Iñárritu, 2014)|||||6
Guyver (Wang, 'Screaming Mad' George, 1991)|||||3.5

October 2014

October 2014

Violent Saturday (Fleischer, 1955)|||||7.5
* Snowpiercer (Bong, 2013)|||||6.5
The Loved One (Richardson, 1965)|||||6
The Aviator (Scorsese, 2004)|||||6.5
* Noah (Aronofsky, 2014)|||||5.5
Giuseppe Makes a Movie (Rifkin, 2014)|||||5.5
* The House by the Cemetery (Fulci, 1981)|||||4
A Million Ways to Die in the West (MacFarlane, 2014)|||||3.5
Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992)|||||6.5
The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (Six, 2011)|||||4.5
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Mitchell, 2001)|||||7
The Dark Backward (Rifkin, 1991)|||||5.5
The Cobweb (Minnelli, 1955)|||||7
Gone Girl (Fincher, 2014)|||||7
Night of the Ghouls (Wood, 1959)|||||2
Killer Joe (Friedkin, 2011)|||||6
* Breakfast at Tiffany's (Edwards, 1961)|||||5.5
Heaven's Gate (Cimino, 1980)|||||6.5

September 2014

September 2014

Hard Eight (Anderson, 1996)|||||4.5
The Zero Theorem (Gilliam, 2013)|||||6
The Sacrament (West, 2013)|||||5.5
Roger & Me (Moore, 1989)|||||6
India: Matri Buhmi (Rossellini, 1959)|||||7
The Green Prince (Schirman, 2014)|||||5
Restless (Van Sant, 2011)|||||6
Proving trope, cliche, and a willful playing into formula can be to good ends.  Van Sant simply saying a pure, affirmative story can be told purely - indie corrective to all the Walk to Remembers (conceived as an Harold and Maude remake), a contraband silent version of the film filmed in tandem a corrective to trendy-indie-film sound and fury and lack of good sense.
Breakfast of Champions (Parker, 1999)|||||3.5
The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995)|||||5.5
To what ends is this romanticism, I don't know, but Singer showcases an impressively baroque style, infusing this tale with an oneirism quite appropriate for the neo-noir, making him seem like the even halfway point between Fassbinder and Brett Ratner.
God Bless America (Goldthwait, 2011)|||||5
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Winterbottom, 2005)|||||5
The Trip to Italy (Winterbottom, 2014)|||||4.5
Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995)|||||6.5
Jodorowsky's Dune (Pavich, 2013)|||||5
* The Serpent and the Rainbow (Craven, 1988)|||||5

August 2014

August 2014

* Funny Face (Donen, 1957)|||||5
Dune (Lynch, 1984)|||||5.5
Los Angeles Plays Itself (Andersen, 2003)|||||8
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Rodriguez, Miller, 2014)|||||4.5
Waking Life (Linklater, 2001)|||||7.5
Macbeth (Polanski, 1971)|||||7
* Witness for the Prosecution (Wilder, 1957)|||||6
Banshee Chapter (Erickson, 2013)|||||3.5
The Scarlet Empress (Sternberg, 1934)|||||6
The Raid 2 (Evans, 2014)|||||5
A filmmaking of postures.
All Cheerleaders Die (McKee/Sivertson, 2013)|||||4.5
Boyhood (Linklater, 2014)|||||7.5
The Rose (Rydell, 1979)|||||6
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Reeves, 2014)|||||5.5
* Black Sabbath (Bava, 1963)|||||7.5
Pourquoi Israel (Lanzmann, 1974)|||||8.5
Stranger Than Paradise (Jarmusch, 1984)|||||7.5
Marathon Man (Schlesinger, 1976)|||||6
Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014)|||||5.5
A Summer's Tale (Rohmer, 1996)|||||8
Leviathan (Paravel, Castaing-Taylor, 2012)|||||7
Mauvais sang (Carax, 1986)|||||7.5

July 2014

July 2014

Paper Moon (Bogdanovich, 1973)|||||5.5
Woman on the Beach (Hong, 2006)|||||6.5
Real (Kurosawa, 2013)|||||5.5
Tale of Cinema (Hong, 2003)|||||7
Duelle (Rivette, 1976)|||||5.5
Save the Green Planet (Jang, 2003)|||||6.5
Resident Evil: Retribution (Anderson, 2012)|||||4.5
Derek (Julien/Rose, 2008)|||||5
The Devils (Russell, 1971)|||||6
Resident Evil: Afterlife (Anderson, 2010)|||||3.5
eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999)|||||7
Deliver Us from Evil (Derrickson, 2014)|||||3.5
Seventh Code (Kurosawa, 2013)|||||7
Snowpiercer (Bong, 2014)|||||6
Pure Gilliam with a touch of debased Hollywood.
Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre (Rousseau, 1983)|||||6
Beeswax (Bujawlski, 2009)|||||6.5
Lessons of Darkness (Herzog, 1992)|||||7.5

June 2014

June 2014

The Witchmaker (Brown, 1969)|||||3.5
* Solaris (Soderbergh, 2002)|||||5.5
Starman (Carpenter, 1984)|||||6
Climates (Ceylan, 2006)|||||5.5
The Day He Arrives (Hong, 2011)|||||7
Oldboy (Lee, 2013)|||||4
Battle Beyond the Stars (Murakami, 1980)|||||4.5
Black Hawk Down (Scott, 2001)|||||4.5
Accident (Losey, 1967)|||||6
Transformers: The Premake (Lee, 2014) (short)|||||++
Oasis of the Zombies (Franco, 1982)|||||2.5
A throwaway horror movie involves the African theater of WWII... the rest of the film a Saharan zombie film... Franco's narcoleptic "style" is at a low, very low bar here but the desert locale and Arab portrait make the non-style sort of a style, lulling us with something of a fascinating success in constructive cross-purposes: Z-schlock and occasionally sensual travelogue, a fitful time-burner in both capacities, especially together.
Hahaha (Hong, 2010)|||||7
Dredd (Travis, 2012)|||||4.5
Short Term 12 (Cretton, 2013)|||||5
La Captive (Akerman, 2000)|||||7.5
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Hughes, 1986)|||||4.5
Detention (Kahn, 2012)|||||4.5
A Fellinian abundance, or fatuous pop puerility?  You decide.
A Talking Picture (Oliveira, 2003)|||||7.5
The Raid: Redemption (Evans, 2011)|||||4
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)|||||5
Malifacent (Stromberg, 2014)|||||3
This was such utter balhooey.

May 2014

May 2014

The Theatre Bizarre (Various, 2011)|||||3.5
C-/C+/C-/B-/D/C-, sympathetically.
Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)|||||8
The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 1988)|||||7
Pain & Gain (Bay, 2013)|||||4.5
Confidential Report (aka Mr. Arkadin) (Welles, 1955)|||||8
Godzilla (Edwards, 2014)|||||5
The Immigrant (Gray, 2013)|||||7.5
One of those ultra-classical narratives, characterized by old-fashioned naivete, openness to ridicule, a well-constructed screenplay of encompassing dramatic ironies and passionate worldly diatribe.  I don't think Gray quite hits anything out of the park, with consistency, but still a film highly affecting and wise.
Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013)|||||6.5
A pure and essential story, somewhat undermined by Pawlikowski's weakness for narrative efficiency.  Not much under the surface, but the surface is a pleasure.
* Phantom of the Paradise (De Palma, 1974)|||||6.5
Journey to Italy (Rossellini, 1954)|||||7
La promesse (Dardennes, 1996)|||||6.5
Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switch-Board Operator (Makavejev, 1967)|||||7.5
The River (Renoir, 1951)|||||7.5
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 1953)|||||7
The Holy Girl (Martel, 2004)|||||7
Fellini's Roma (Fellini, 1972)|||||7.5
The Merry Widow (von Stroheim, 1925)|||||6
Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (Ulmer, 1957)|||||5.5
* Prince of Darkness (Carpenter, 1987)|||||76
First of all, so Hawks (also, unrelatedly, sweet smatterings of Argento).  Operatic and portentous.  An all-in conflation of the hysterical imperatives of religion (to reveal Evil and what may lie supernally - or subatomically - to humanity) with the hopeful wishes of the modern, scientific, sentimental age, and so, a bit reflective of the science vs. religion-concerned Exorcist II whose spiritual images are almost matched, well, at least in regularity.  Carpenter seems stricken by a desire to frame icons and computers as the monoliths buttressing our vertical existence.  Around the religiosity is the HAWKS, though, and this film seems to flaunt the largest - and, tellingly, most anonymous, as apostles often are - of Carpenter's teams of do-gooders.  It doesn't quite deliver on these facets by the end, but a quality remains throughout.
* A History of Violence (Cronenberg, 2005)|||||5.5
Blood Simple (Coen, 1984)|||||76.5
So Hitchcock, if he were an American nihilist.  Manages to capture some of Hitchcock's concerting visual poetry (a slo-mo newspaper acting like a kissing Grace Kelly), but to the movie brat's lurid ends.  Finally, a masterful concerto of death and death drives, within a spiraling drainage of meaninglessness and one woman's triumph in the face of meaninglessness, caps it off on a high point.
* Unfaithfully Yours (Sturges, 1948)|||||7.5
Clash of the Titans (Leterrier, 2010)|||||2
Under the Skin (Glazer, 2013)|||||7.5
The Girl in Room 20 (Williams, 1946)|||||6
Shivers (Cronenberg, 1975)|||||4

April 2014

April 2014

* Damien: Omen II (Taylor, 1978)|||||4
Visually capable, but a story that could have teemed with subtext, as something of cruel, messianic scripture taking place in modern times, is just increasingly utterly subtextless, adamantly disinterested in emotions in the rush to serve horrendously dumb schematics.  Even genre films could have sprawl back in the 70's storytelling heyday (a horror film taking place in a military academy?  Neat.), and this held a place in my imagination as a child, but clearly the Omen franchise is a vacuum.
Noah (Aronofsky, 2014)|||||5
The Unknown Known (Morris, 2014)|||||7
* Body Snatchers (Ferrara, 1993)|||||4.5
Tess (Polanski, 1979)|||||6.5
Oculus (Flanagan, 2014)|||||4.5
Young Soul Rebels (Julien, 1991)|||||5
* Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)|||||6.5
I suppose one cannot refuse to understand the "petulant bro" reaction of douchebag audiences of 1977 or Friedkin immediately calling Boorman an anonymous movie-making moron.  In my theater screening of this last night, I could feel the viewers around me trying desperately but failing to commodify this experience of such little sense and long, drawn-out scope.  This is not a night-out movie.  It's alternately painful and painfully beautiful, a screaming, shrieking religious adventure, and experience.  Cinepassion on Exorcist II
Scenes from a Marriage (Television Version) (Bergman, 1973)|||||8
Workers, Peasants (Straub, Huillet, 2002)|||||7
Mes petites amoureuses (Eustache, 1974)|||||6.5
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (Levine, 2006)|||||4.5
Gummo (Korine, 1997)|||||6
Welp, I can take back my haughty prognostication.  Surprised, but I found this cloying debut feature better than Spring Breakers.
Nymphomaniac Vol. 2 (Von Trier, 2014)|||||7
Miami Vice (Mann, 2006)|||||5.5
Maniac Cop (Lustig, 1988)|||||4
Conan the Barbarian (Milius, 1983)|||||6.5
Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 (Von Trier, 2014)|||||8

March 2014

March 2014

Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)|||||4.5
Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard, 1998)|||||8.5
Muppets Most Wanted (Bobin, 2014)|||||5.5
Blue Sunshine (Lieberman, 1978)|||||4.5
Weirdest movie ever.  Enjoyed our uber-neurotic freak-hero.  Post-viewing must read.
Kanal (Wajda, 1957)|||||6.5
Wrong (Dupieux, 2012)|||||5
Dracula 3D (Argento, 2012)|||||3.5
Bad, yes.  But in being bad, in being a case of an old filmmaker not keeping up with the means with which to make a good film, which do adapt and update with the times and technologies, then this is still an Argento flick and perceptibly so.  If anything, Argento's Dracula is as stodgy as Tod Browning's original, and that's almost a compliment.  It's so without the excess of modern horror.
Identification of a Woman (Antonioni, 1983)|||||6.5
Last Life in the Universe (Ratanaruang, 2003)|||||6.5
Z (Gavras, 1969)|||||6.5
V/H/S/2 (Various, 2013)|||||5

February 2014

February 2014

The Great Beauty (Sorrentino, 2013)|||||4.5
Pompeii (Anderson, 2014)|||||4.5
Yankee Doodle Dandy (Curtiz, 1942)|||||5.5
Her (Jonze, 2013)|||||7
* To Catch a Thief (Hitchcock, 1955)|||||7
Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong, 2000)|||||7
A two hour journey of coercion.  Shockingly, no one is damned in the end (they are liberated through Hong's blunt bathos, redeemed romantically), but the journey is a damnable one anyway.
Drug War (To, 2013)|||||6.5
Drinking Buddies (Swanberg, 2013)|||||6
Swanberg gets it.  Perfect resolution, and the greatest fear sitting through this film of such sensible measures is that it would not stick a landing.
What Maisie Knew (McGehee & Siegel, 2012)|||||5
An exercise in unceasing emotional identification with an 8 year old girl.  Particular enough about the minutiae of divorce and custody proceedings, and in capturing the nuances of symptomatic behavior from those adults embroiled in it, to warrant some social interest, and also adeptly conjured is the aforementioned experiential world and interior mind of a young, troubled child, but, with bold generic-ness, a wholly ripe maudlin-ism - both cinematically and narratively - wins out.
White Heat (Walsh, 1949)|||||6.5
The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2013)|||||8
The Lego Movie (Miller, Lord, 2014)|||||5.5
The Grudge 3 (Wilkins, 2009)|||||3.5
They Died With Their Boots On (Walsh, 1941)|||||7.5
Stranger by the Lake (Guiraudie, 2013)|||||6.5
A deft film, if a bit inert. A text on sociability, it plunges us into a world (by the lake) that simply cannot be held to the same social or moral expectations viewers normally hold and would normally place upon watching another hetero-noir like another version of The Postman Always Rings Twice. What the film does is offer a vital look at the desperate fragments of functional sociability in a society that is forced to exist outside of reality - rather than some judgmental comment on cruising culture, or "hedonism," the film proves its worth in denying such an easy reading, instead claiming to expose the sad, double-edged existential realm these men must inhabit.  I think of this film and the saying: "No man is an island"... except for those hazarding, by some necessity, a life at the margins. 
Buffalo '66 (Gallo, 1998)|||||6.5
At Berkeley (Wiseman, 2013)|||||7

January 2014

January 2014

Our Sunhi (Hong, 2013)|||||6.5
Sun Don't Shine (Seimetz, 2012)|||||5
When We Lived in Miami (Seimetz, 2013) (short)|||||
All That She Surveys (Mairs, 2012)|||||+
* Tales from the Crypt (Francis, 1972)|||||4.5
* Asylum (Baker, 1972)|||||5
Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas, 2013)|||||5.5
Once Upon a Time in America (Leone, 1983)|||||6
Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)|||||6.5
From Beyond the Grave (Connor, 1973)|||||6
American Hustle (Russell, 2013)|||||5.5
Blue Valentine (Cianfrance, 2010)|||||5.5
US 47 (Bening, 2013)|||||6.5
signs (Benning, 2013) (short)|||||+
Flesh+Blood (Verhoeven, 1985)|||||7.5
* The Searchers (Ford, 1956)|||||6.5
The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese, 2013)|||||5.5
Passion (De Palma, 2012)|||||6.5
Mama (Muschietti, 2013)|||||3.5
The Lone Ranger (Verbinski, 2013)|||||5
* The Wolf Man (Waggner, 1941)|||||5.5
Le plaisir (Ophuls, 1952)|||||7.5
La cérémonie (Chabrol, 1995)|||||7.5
The Floorwalker (short) (Chaplin, 1916)|||||+
The Rink (short) (Chaplin, 1916)|||||++
* The Invisible Man (Whale, 1933)|||||7.5
Only God Forgives (Refn, 2013)|||||5