November 2015

November 2015

A Christmas Tale (Desplechin, 2008)|||||7.5
Bridge of Spies (Spielberg, 2015)|||||5.5
Prizzi's Honor (Huston, 1985)|||||5.5
The Errand Boy (Lewis, 1961)|||||5.5
Mission: Impossible (De Palma, 1996)|||||6.5
A Burning Hot Summer (Garrel, 2001)|||||7
My Golden Days (Desplechin, 2015)|||||6
Hamlet (Olivier, 1945)|||||8
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong, 2015)|||||7
Hitchcock/Truffaut (Jones, 2015)|||||5.5
The Forbidden Room (Maddin, 2015)|||||5.5
What We Do In the Shadows (Waititi, Clement, 2014)|||||4
King Lear (Godard, 1988)|||||8.5
The Green Inferno (Roth, 2014)|||||5
Scarlet Street (Lang, 1945)|||||7.5

October 2015

October 2015

Tales of Halloween (Carolyn, Marshall, et al., 2015)|||||3.5
Knock Knock (Roth, 2015)|||||5
The Assassin (Hou, 2015)|||||5.5
The Last Broadcast (Avalos, Weiler, 1998)|||||5
* The ABCs of Death (Various, 2012)|||||4.5
A Dirty Shame (Waters, 2004)|||||5
Crimson Peak (Del Toro, 2015)|||||4.5
The ABCs of Death 2 (Various, 2014)|||||4.5
Tomorrowland (Bird, 2015)|||||6
Zvenigora (Dovzhenko, 1928)|||||8.5
The French Lieutenant's Woman (Reisz, 1981)|||||5
The Canyons (Schrader, 2013)|||||4
The Walk (Zemeckis, 2015)|||||4.5
Phoenix (Petzold, 2014)|||||6.5
Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015)|||||5

September 2015

September 2015

What Is It? (Glover, 2000)|||||4.5
The Visit (Shyamalan, 2015)|||||7
Queen of Earth (Perry, 2015)|||||6
Conquest (Fulci, 1983)|||||5.5
The American Astronaut (McAbee, 2001)|||||4.5
The Woman in Black 2: The Angel of Death (Harper, 2015)|||||3.5
Tokyo Gore Police (Nishimura, 2008)|||||4.5
Area 51 (Peli, 2015)|||||3.5
* New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)|||||5.5
Dear White People (Simien, 2015)|||||6.5
Tangerine (Baker, 2015)|||||5.5
Burying the Ex (Dante, 2014)|||||3.5
White Bird in a Blizzard (Arakki, 2014)|||||6
Music of the Heart (Craven, 1999)|||||5
The Mend (Magary, 2015)|||||6

August 2015

August 2015

Dark Horse (Solondz, 2014)|||||6
* It Follows (Mitchell, 2014)|||||5.5
Sleepless in Seattle (Ephron, 1993)|||||3.5
Best of Enemies (Gordon, Neville, 2015)|||||5
Othello (Welles, 1952)|||||8
* May (McKee, 2003)|||||7.5
Tom at the Farm (Dolan, 2014)|||||5.5
The World (Jia, 2004)|||||6
Whirlpool (Preminger, 1949)|||||5.5
Enemy (Villeneuve, 2013)|||||5
Run of the Arrow (Fuller, 1957)|||||8
* The Naked Spur (Mann, 1953)|||||6.5
Chappie (Blomkamp, 2014)|||||4
The Theory of Everything (Marsh, 2014)|||||4.5
Morocco (Sternberg, 1930)|||||6.5
Escape to Burma (Dwan, 1955)|||||5.5
* Songs from the Second Floor (Andersson, 2000)|||||5.5

July 2015

July 2015

* Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, 1955)|||||8
Kes (Loach, 1969)|||||6.5
Jersey Boys (Eastwood, 2014)|||||5
Big Hero Six (Hall, Williams, 2014)|||||4.5
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Andersson, 2014)|||||5.5
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (Lawrence, 2014)|||||2.5
Empire of Passion (Oshima, 1976)|||||7.5
* American Sniper (Eastwood, 2014)|||||6
Sebastiane (Jarman, 1976)|||||7
Ex Machina (Garland, 2015)|||||4
Liliom (Borzage, 1930)|||||6.5
Street Angel (Borzage, 1928)|||||5.5
Breaking News (To, 2004)|||||6.5
At Long Last Love (Bogdanovich, 1975)|||||5
They All Laughed (Bogdanovich, 1981)|||||6
A Star is Born (Wellman, 1937)|||||6
Terminator: Genisys (Taylor, 2015)|||||3.5
Scream 4 (Craven, 2011)|||||4.5
La Sapienza (Green, 2014)|||||7

June 2015

June 2015

Al otro lado del espejo (Franco, 1973)|||||5
Nightmares Come at Night (Franco, 1970)|||||5.5
* Whiplash (Chazelle, 2014)|||||5
How Green Was My Valley (Ford, 1941)|||||7
The Wings of Eagles (Ford, 1957)|||||6
Nightcrawler (Gilroy, 2014)|||||4.5
Inside Out (Docter, 2015)|||||6.5
* Girlhood (Sciamma, 2014)|||||7
* The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962)|||||7
The Visitor (Paradisi, 1979)|||||4
* Happy Birthday to Me (Thompson, 1981)|||||4
City of Pirates (Ruiz, 1983)|||||6.5
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)|||||3.5
Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)|||||3
Mondo Hollywood (Cohen, 1964)|||||5.5
Je, tu, il, elle (Akerman, 1976)|||||8

May 2015

May 2015

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Amirpour, 2014)|||||5.5
San Andreas (Peyton, 2015)|||||2.5
Saint Laurent (Bonello, 2014)|||||5.5
As Above, So Below (Dowdle, 2014)|||||3.5
Poltergeist (Kenan, 2015)|||||4
"A-artistic" but fun, inventive cartoon redux of the original.  Pure gimmick, about 10x smaller in dramatic & narrative scale, but can we just savor a true big-budget tongue-in-cheek horror film?  The Conjuring gets praise and this gets condescended to, Wan's "artful," "original" horror lauded over Kenan's classicalist irreverence, and the truer effort and care is actually the other way around.  Last shot has an ecstatic effect and evil squirrel is brilliant.
Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (King, 1955)|||||5.5
Mogambo (Ford, 1953)|||||6
American Sniper (Eastwood, 2014)|||||7
Genre-film economy and expediency supersede ideology, and what results is Eastwood's hero tribute being as atmospheric and close-quarters, interiorized, and gloomily psychological as Antonioni esoteric-drama. Think of the war imagery in Bergman's The Silence and you get the overall atmosphere, think of the scenery of Antonioni's Red Desert and you've got Eastwood's backdrops - whether bars, a home, Fallujah, the wooded country of a Texas shooting range, etc. - serving as similarly lush spaces in which to tease apart the oppositional existence of (movie) Chris Kyle through alternating fluid blocking, observational close-ups, and cruel narrative contrivances, such as a scene of a presiding sandstorm standing uneasily in the stead of Red Desert's fog bank sequence.
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)|||||6
Dust in the Wind (Hou, 1987)|||||6.5
A Summer at Grandpa's (Hou, 1984)|||||6
The Plough and the Stars (Ford, 1936)|||||6
Fascination (Rollin, 1979)|||||5.5
Starry Eyes (Kolsch, Widmyer, 2014)|||||3.5
* RR (Benning, 2007)|||||6.5
* The Babadook (Kent, 2014)|||||5.5

April 2015

April 2015

Clouds of Sils Maria (Assayas, 2014)|||||7.5
Saudade (Rousseau, 2012) (Short)|||||++
Exodus: Gods and Kings (Scott, 2014)|||||3.5
Repo Man (Cox, 1984)|||||7
Cremaster 2 (Barney, 1999)|||||7
Cremaster 5 (Barney, 1995)|||||5.5
Invaders from Mars (Menzies, 1953)|||||4.5
Unexpectedly no-nonsense thrills from a film purportedly about a kid, for kids. Killing little Cathy and an assassination attempt automatically makes this the hardcore version of Tobe Hooper's dreamy Spielbergian remake. Scientific progressivism & American moral rationalism is dialectically, glowingly touted while the "cold" Commies, umm, "have their reasons," making this the ne plus ultra of "Those were the good old days... or were they?" cinema.
Outrage (Kitano, 2010)|||||6.5
Big Eyes (Burton, 2014)|||||6
Ashes and Diamonds (Wajda, 1958)|||||6.5
Recount (Roach, 2008) (TV)|||||4
* Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)|||||9
Liverpool (Alonso, 2008)|||||7
The Quiet Ones (Pogue, 2014)|||||4
* The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963)|||||9.5
I devoted much adolescent thought to The Birds, but it needed none of that bit-chomping, psychoanalytical, thesis/support-driven discourse. It is simply stunning at every turn and, by the end, utterly moving on a level of complete artistic experience, making my callow, erstwhile attempts to concede that tiny note of Melanie and Lydia Brenner giving in to each others' embraces at the end as "sentiment" seem like the greatest misunderstanding of a work of complete and total sight.  The Birds is one of the truest achievements of the cinema, our good work's truest testament to an existence of doubt and pain.
* Interstellar (Nolan, 2014)|||||6
It Follows (Mitchell, 2015)|||||5.5

March 2015

March 2015

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (Gibney, 2015)|||||5.5
Shock Treatment (Sharman, 1981)|||||6
Listen Up Philip (Perry, 2014)|||||6.5
* Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)|||||5.5
Interior. Leather Bar. (Mathews, Franco, 2013)|||||4
An Honest Liar (Measom, Weinstein, 2014)|||||5
John Wick (Stahelski, 2014)|||||4.5
Scream 3 (Craven, 2000)|||||5
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford, 1949)|||||6.5
* Magnolia (Anderson, 1999)|||||5.5
Citizenfour (Poitras, 2014)|||||6
Cymbeline (Almereyda, 2014)|||||5.5
* Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959)|||||6
* Rabid Dogs (Kidnapped Edit) (Bava, 1974)|||||5.5
The Purge: Anarchy (DeMonaco, 2014)|||||4
The Purge (DeMonaco, 2013)|||||4
... And God Spoke (The Making Of) (Borman, 1993)|||||5
Capote (Miller, 2005)|||||5
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Apatow, 2005)|||||3.5
Crank (Neveldine/Taylor, 2006)|||||5.5
The Thoughts That Once We Had (Andersen, 2015)|||||7.5
Where is the Friend's Home? (Kiarostami, 1987)|||||7
* AVP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)|||||3.5
Cinderfella (Tashlin, 1960)|||||6
The Parallax View (Pakula, 1974)|||||6.5
Timecrimes (Vigalondo, 2007)|||||5.5

February 2015

February 2015

Sex Tape (Kasdan, 2014)|||||2.5
Tomboy (Sciamma, 2011)|||||6.5
Elena and Her Men (Renoir, 1956)|||||7.5
Thief (Mann, 1981)|||||7
Manhattan Baby (Fulci, 1982)|||||5.5
Art School Confidential (Zwigoff, 2006)|||||6
* Bullitt (Yates, 1968)|||||6
Girlhood (Sciamma, 2014)|||||6.5
Djinn (Hooper, 2013)|||||6.5
Matador (Almodóvar, 1986)|||||6.5
The Cyclist (Makhmalbaf, 1987)|||||6.5
Jupiter Ascending (Wachowskis, 2015)|||||5
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Naruse, 1960)|||||7.5
* Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, 1971)|||||7
* The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)|||||7
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (Richter, 1984)|||||4.5
Whiplash (Chazelle, 2014)|||||5.5
Bully (Clark, 2001)|||||7

January 2015

January 2015

Universal Soldier (Emmerich, 1990)|||||4.5
Winter Sleep (Ceylan, 2014)|||||7
Mr. Majestyk (Fleischer, 1974)|||||5
The Don is Dead (Fleischer, 1973)|||||5.5
The Girl (Jarrold, 2013) (TV)|||||5
Goodbye to Language 3D (Godard, 2014)|||||6.5
Election (Payne, 1999)|||||6.5
Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki, 2003)|||||6
The Last Run (Fleischer, 1971)|||||6
The New Centurions (Fleischer, 1972)|||||7
The Thing (Heijningen, Jr., 2011)|||||3.5
* The Thing (Carpenter, 1982)|||||7
The Emerald Forest (Boorman, 1985)|||||6.5
* Doppelgänger (Kurosawa, 2003)|||||7.5
* Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gilliam, 1998)|||||5.5
* Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)|||||6.5
The River (Tsai, 1998)|||||7
* The House on the Edge of the Park (Deodato, 1980)|||||5.5
Late August, Early September (Assayas, 1998)|||||7
The Producers (Stroman, 2005)|||||4.5
Mr. Turner (Leigh, 2014)|||||6.5
* Scanners (Cronenberg, 1981)|||||6.5
Lisztomania (Russell, 1975)|||||5.5
* Inherent Vice (Anderson, 2014)|||||5.5
Female Trouble (Waters, 1974)|||||6
See No Evil (Fleischer, 1971)|||||5.5
10 Rillington Place (Fleischer, 1971)|||||7
Monkey On My Back (De Toth, 1957)|||||6
Force Majeure (Östlund, 2014)|||||5
The Nomi Song (Horn, 2004)|||||5.5
The Assassination of Richard Nixon (Mueller, 2004)|||||4.5
* Stuck (Gordon, 2006)|||||6
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (Newland, 1973) (TV)|||||4.5

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