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
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