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