Unpleasant and brilliant, United 93 rightly makes 9/11 into a whirl of shock and confusion. –November 30, 2024
Tag: Challenging – Classic
The Guilty
A corrupt cop works emergency dispatch in The Guilty. With limited knowledge of a crime, a real time investigation makes reel time into something poignant. –October 31, 2024
Babel
Babel made me uncomfortable in 2006. Now that discomfort signals greatness. –October 31, 2024
Paradise Now
I’m not used to rooting for suicide-bombers, which is why Paradise Now is essential viewing. –October 31, 2024
The Lives of Others
The Life of Others is about an East German cop tasked with destroying an artist on the communist side of the Berlin Wall. Maybe the best movie of its year. –September 30, 2024
Carnal Knowledge
Carnal Knowledge combines bonkers profanity with blunt male privilege. Painful, embarrassing, and brilliant. –September 30, 2024
Threads
Just for fun, I watched Threads with friends and was forced to recall my boyhood worry about nuclear Armageddon, which is the setup for this genius-bummer of a BBC movie from 1984. –August 31, 2024
Punishment Park
Unbelievably prescient, Punishment Park connects unchecked state power with intra-generational conflict as the basis of reality TV. All in 1971. And no one paid attention. –July 31, 2024
The Devils
The Devils imagines a libertine priest accused of harassing a convent. It includes lots of nudity and desecration of Catholic symbols, but it’s Oliver Reed’s voice that truly seduces. –June 30, 2024
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
A dumb, dirty man plus a fallen woman = McCabe & Mrs. Miller, a brilliant Western with three anachronistic Leonard Cohen songs and a smalltown set as prototype for Deadwood. –June 30, 2024
Rumble Fish
Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish is an experimental mashup shot in black and white (mostly) with a bevy of future stars. It refuses to entertain, and I like it. –May 31, 202
Lebanon
Lebanon is restricted to the turret of a four-man Israeli tank during the Lebanese Civil War. Anti-war, pro-human, jarring, and brilliant. –May 31, 2024
Mom and Dad
Want to see graphic video of venereal disease? Attach that spectacle to a teen girl’s pregnancy, and you’ve got Mom and Dad, WWII-era greatness. Straight. No chaser. –April 30, 2024
Past Lives
Magic on a small scale, Past Lives explores a young immigrant woman’s life as she considers relationship pathways she didn’t take. The final scene lingers long after “the end”. –March 31, 2024
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
Ruder and lewder than I remember, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is a great satire of censorship hypocrisy and American exceptionalism. –March 31, 2024
Waltz with Bashir
Waltz with Bashir animates one man’s autobiography around the horror of service in the Israeli Defense Force. Powerful stuff for all it suggests and refers to and considers. –February 29, 2024
American Symphony
American Symphony is the best romance-turned biography of the decade. –February 29, 2024
Water
Water is great. But it’s about an eight-year-old widow in India who is banished, for life, to a widows’ ashram where the older widows want to give her something more. –December 30, 2023
Murderball
Disability is a tough subject, and Murderball adjusts our POV through a sports story that makes me cry. –November 30, 2023
Brokeback Mountain
My reaction has shifted in time. I now think Brokeback Mountain may be the finest movie of 2005 and among the finest Westerns ever made. –November 30, 2023
Syriana
At first glance it’s complicated. Then Syriana reveals how limited resources are hunted by too many greedy people, foremost among them: human connection. –October 31, 2023
Cameraperson
Cameraperson is the memoir of a cinematographer (Kirsten Johnson) who uses outtakes to consider life, death, pain, satisfaction, and beauty. I cried three times. –October 31, 2023
Shoah
Shoah means “catastrophe”, and Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary demonstrates what this means through first-hand, heart-breaking testimony. –September 30, 2023
All Is Lost
All Is Lost showcases Redford doing the next right thing in a series of ocean sailing crises. And there’s just one minutes of dialogue. Excellent. –August 31, 2023
No Country for Old Men
A little regional dialogue goes a long way in No Country for Old Men, which follows a sheriff who misses older times that are gone forever. Stupendous and properly Oscar-winning. –July 31, 2023
They Shall Not Grow Old
Colorization mangles source footage for commercial appeal. Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Oldembraces this potential and marries colorization with sound recordings of now-dead soldiers to arrive at something upsettingly, impressively, vivid. –July 31, 2023
Her
Spike Jonze’s Her is a masterpiece about alienation and addiction, and how a man learns to love himself and other people. –June 30, 2023
Perspolis
Take 1: I re-watch it every few years, and Persepolis is always a treat. Why? It’s an animated documentary that treats a girl’s transition into womanhood as something worth celebrating, warts, war, cubist people, and all. Take 2: Again, Persepolis pleases me, this time for the benefit of my second daughter. Wow. –July 31, 2023
Pumping Iron
Pitching Pumping Iron by contextualizing the history of bodybuilding is a fast track to yawns. Instead, notice how it’s the story of nearly naked men cruising each other while starving themselves on the way to a public pose down that made Arnold famous. –May 31, 2023
The Piano
In The Piano, Holly Hunter is traded between men, and she beguiles them with a gift for tickling the ivories. I cry whenever I hear “The Heart Asks Pleasure First” by Michael Nyman. –May 31, 2023
The Squid and the Whale
Take 1: All failed marriages are embarrassing, and The Squid and the Whale shows us how two parents and their two children can be profanely and specifically funny in the most uncomfortable, embarrassing ways possible. Take 2: The Squid and the Whale showcases Jeff Daniels pushing unlikability to an extreme while remaining sympathetic. –October 31, 2023
Bamboozled
Spike Lee is a genius, and Bamboozled is one of his easily overlooked masterworks. –March 31, 2023
Midnight Cowboy
Of ways to unpack the only X-rated Best Picture Academy Award winner in history, the most interesting may be Midnight Cowboy’s value as an experimental movie that gave birth to the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1970s. –March 31, 2023
The Seventh Seal
Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece The Seventh Seal confronts faithlessness during the Bubonic Plague years and hits home with a knight’s sacrifice to save a family. –March 31, 2023
Rashomon
Kurosawa’s Rashomon explores four separate stories describing a single event as the excuse for three strangers to spin tales during a storm. Pioneering and brilliant. –February 28, 2023
Wag the Dog
Wag the Dog was made during Clinton’s second term before Lewinsky. It’s the story of covering up a president’s sexual misdeeds with a manufactured war, and it features De Niro and Hoffman. Genius. –February 28, 2023
Tomboy
Shot from the height of a child, mostly in mid-shots and close-ups, Celine Schiamma’s Tomboy is about (a) a transboy; (b) a young lesbian with masculine presentation; (c) sibling love; and (d), all of the above. –February 28, 2023
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Monty Python’s Life of Brian tells us: “Blessed are the cheesemakers.” –February 28, 2023
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Everything Everywhere All at Once is so much weirder than you might anticipate from the trailer, and you might become impatient. Then you’ll cry when you see how family is first made through reproduction and, later, by choice. –January 31, 2023
A Star is Born
Gaga and Cooper bring it hard in A Star Is Born, easily one of the best filmmaking debuts ever, which uses music superstardom as a Trojan Horse to dramatize addiction. –January 31, 2023
Last Tango in Paris
It’s the showcase for one of Brando’s greatest performances, and Last Tango in Paris is the literal and figurative expression of various sexual assaults. In other words, Bertolucci 1972. –January 31, 2023
Team America: World Police
Trey Parker and Matt Stone know the limits of taste and deliberately violate them. Team America: World Police is the one where puppets hump and no one leaves unoffended. –November 30, 2022
Natural Born Killers
Been a long time since I last saw it, but Natural Born Killers maintains its genre blending, senses-overloading ambiguities with a painfully young RDJ stealing every scene. –November 30, 2022
The Sea Inside
Javier Bardem is a wonderful actor. The Sea Inside lets him shine as a quadriplegic seeking the legal right to suicide. And he succeeds. And it’s marvelous. –October 31, 2022
Fahrenheit 9/11
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 suggests that George W. Bush destroyed America through the War on Terror. You may hate the film, but you’ll remember Lila Lipscomb and the found footage of American troopers in combat. –October 31, 2022
Love & Mercy
Love & Mercy is painful, never more so than when Paul Dano plays Brian Wilson as a troubled young man inventing the sounds of the future. –August 31, 2022
Harakiri
Take 1: A Japanese masterwork of narrative twists, Harakiri teaches the importance of learning an opponent’s backstory before demanding ritual suicide. Take 2: From “The Hi-Lo Bro Show” podcast: “This is the one where Richard blazons the samurai katana, wakizashi, and the tanto, and Garrett remembers thinking that a photorealist depiction of gang violence might be the… Continue reading Harakiri
Blowup
Blowup is a mid-1960s relic that you haven’t seen, so you press “play” and happily realize it fills the water glasses for a table set by Psycho and Peeping Tom. –June 30, 2022
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Burton and Taylor execrate their marriage through Edward Albee’s love language of verbal contest. See Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for star power, but reflect on how unpleasantness is a great wellspring of art. –May 31, 2022
Fantastic Planet
Fantastic Planet is about blue giants that keep people as pets because they can. Then the people revolt, and the blue giants must figure out whether to squash them, poison them, or accommodate sentience in all its forms. It’s animated, blunt, and quite enjoyable. –March 31, 2022
Fritz the Cat
Fritz the Cat is an animated, anthropomorphized cat. He’s also sexually voracious, racist, and profane, which makes him a great lead in a bonkers feature from Ralph Bakshi, whose work, here, is simultaneously irritating and stunning. –March 31, 2022
Pig
Garrett Chaffin-Quiray and Ed Rosa get a grip on porcine friendship, the influence of Bruce Springsteen, and the odd brilliance of Nicolas Cage. –February 28, 2022
Colors
Take 1: “There’s two bulls standing on top of a mountain,” says Bobby Duvall to Sean Penn in Colors: the proto ’hood film with great supporting actors and Ice-T’s titular song that explains, “I am a nightmare walking, psychopath talking / King of my jungle, just a gangster stalking.” Take 2: From “The Hi-Lo Bro Show”… Continue reading Colors
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
“Come on feet, cruise for me.” –January 31, 2022
Ivan’s Childhood
Unexpected black-and-white brilliance in a more realistic narrative than Tarkovsky typically provides us, which centers on Ivan’s Childhood, or a boy fighting the Wehrmacht on the Russian front. Brilliant images. Naturalistic acting. A spooky forest. A spookier lake. Genius. –December 31, 2021
A Clockwork Orange
Garrett Chaffin-Quiray said, “It was gorgeousness,” and Ed Rosa replied, “And gorgeousity made flesh.” –December 31, 2021
Mystic River
Is the story of a young woman’s death cause for celebration? Yes, when Mystic River’s backdrop is blue collar Boston with a gnarly-good cast that elevates a B-grade police procedural fit for Law & Order: SVU into a minor big screen classic. –November 30, 2021
21 Grams
21 Grams is a puzzle about three people’s lives that pulls together moments of powerful acting. Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio del Toro bring it, and they bring it hard, with Melissa Leo and Charlotte Gainsbourg doing some heavy lifting, too. –November 30, 2021
American Splendor
American Splendor tells the story of Harvey Pekar, using Harvey Pekar as a color commentator about Paul Giamatti playing Harvey Pekar. A marvelous experiment with ingenuity and heart. –October 31, 2021
Johnny Got His Gun
What do you call a guy with no arms and legs in the water? Bob. What do you call a Doughboy with no arms or legs, or a way to communicate in a veterans’ hospital? Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo’s experimental screed against war. –October 31, 2021
Straw Dogs
Garrett Chaffin-Quiray and Ed Rosa wonder if Bloody Sam Peckinpah is a closeted feminist. –September 30, 2021
The Silence of the Lambs
Beauty meets Beast. –September 30, 2021
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
“My family’s always been in meat.” –December 31, 2017
Eraserhead
“I’ve seen this neighborhood change from pastures to the hellhole it is now! “ From The Elephant Man (1980), his most mainstream movie, through Blue Velvet (1986), his most celebrated film, with less-known works like Wild at Heart (1990), The Straight Story (1999), and Inland Empire (2006); and from the studio flop Dune (1984) through a foray into television, Twin Peaks (1990-1991, 2017), I find David Lynch’s work difficult to… Continue reading Eraserhead
Wings
“Life marched at double-quick in those feverish days of ’17.” It’s hard to consider artifacts from an earlier time. Not only is there a need to establish context, there is an equal need to evaluate what’s discovered on its own merits as well as in regard to the present. Tagged as, “The Drama of the… Continue reading Wings
All Quiet on the Western Front
“When it comes to dying for your country, it’s better not to die at all.” American cinematic depictions of war have run the gamut from patriotic and wide-eyed national chauvinism to harsh self-criticism over the value of conquest. There have also been considerable efforts to imagine wars and military crises in other countries, and certainly… Continue reading All Quiet on the Western Front
Se7en
Don’t open the box. It’s just that simple, but Pitt can’t help himself. Se7en. –February 28, 2021
The Road
Cormac McCarthy pitching The Road to Hollywood: “Aragorn loses Aileen Wuornos and takes care of their son while avoiding cannibals. It’s a love story. Where’s my Nobel?” –December 31, 2020
Atonement
What happens when you add a creepy girl who misreads horny adults? Joe Wright’s Atonement, in which Mr. Tumnus and Elizabeth Swann don’t work out happily ever after. –December 31, 2020
The Wind Rises
My favorite Miyazaki is The Wind Rises. –December 31, 2020
Stalker
Take 1: Three dudes wander a post-alien-invasion Soviet hinterland in search of a wish fulfillment room. They suffer and argue and achieve little. Stalker: Mission accomplished. Take 2: From “The Hi-Lo Bro Show” podcast: “This is the one where three men galivant through Estonia, and Heston plays the Lamb of God. Richard remembers the early 1980s,… Continue reading Stalker
Pan’s Labyrinth
Take 1: Ofelia’s Pan’s Labyrinth-trials symbolize three stages in pregnancy. And I can’t stop thinking about the Colonel’s timepiece. Take 2: With its many slurps, gurgles, and clicks, the soundtrack to Pan’s Labyrinth is on par with its wonderfully designed horror show imagery. Among the best movies of 2006. –October 31, 2024
Bowling for Columbine
Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine hits hard when it uses the surveillance footage inside Columbine High. Otherwise, it’s a guy with a weight problem talking to people who all agree that guns let people shoot people, and we all know that already, don’t we? –October 31, 2020
Cleo from 5 to 7
Truffaut and Godard are the famous edge of the French New Wave, but Agnes Varda is the one I like to watch. See Cleo from 5 to 7. –October 31, 2020
Cries and Whispers
Take 1: Take four women, one of them dying, and reminisce in close-up with destabilizing fade outs to red. It’s Cries and Whispers, among Bergman’s greats, but beware broken glass. Take 2: From “The Hi-Lo Bro Show” podcast: “This is the one where John Locke enjoys Bach and Chopin. Garrett thinks 19th century Swedes are cold… Continue reading Cries and Whispers
Munich
Massacres are not sexy. After 2.5 hours of painstaking historical reconstruction, Munich zeroes in on Eric Bana’s orgasm, crosscut with slaughtered Israeli Olympians, and the result is confused shock like the terrorist attack in Munich in 1972. –September 30, 2020
Monsters and Men
A police shooting told through three points-of-view makes Monsters and Men into something brilliant. It could not be timelier if it tried. –August 31, 2020
Cruising
Al Pacino is an ambitious cop who goes undercover in Manhattan’s late 1970s, gay, BDSM scene so he can stop a serial killer who preys on one-night stands. Cruising: another weird, repulsive story from William Friedkin. –August 31, 2020
High Life
Claire Denis is a difficult filmmaker, and High Life is hard to like. While Pattinson and Binoche may move you to watch, spaghettification and The Box will haunt your dreams. –April 30, 2020
The Nightingale
The second time she’s raped, you think The Nightingale can’t get any worse. And it does. And it’s brilliant for overlapping vengeance with intersectionality in a Western from Australia. –April 30, 2020
Amour
“I started to tell him the story of the movie, and as I did, all the emotion came back. I didn’t want to cry in front of the boy, but it was impossible; there I was, crying out loud in the courtyard, and I told him the whole drama to the bitter end.” Carol J.… Continue reading Amour
Sans Soleil
“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything – except wounds.” French filmmaker Chris Marker experimented widely across his 60+ year career, most often as an essayist. The reason this term of art fits is that his body of work, including shorts, features, books, and installations,… Continue reading Sans Soleil
Raging Bull
“So give me a stage / Where this bull here can rage / And though I could fight / I’d much rather recite / That’s entertainment.“ The reputation of Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece from 1980, is hard to oversell or adequately describe. Critics from around the world regularly claim the movie’s status atop “best of”… Continue reading Raging Bull
Das Boot: Director’s Cut
Ever seen a WWII movie? Underwater? From the POV of a Nazi sub? That’s Wolfgang Petersen’s brilliant and punishing Das Boot, which means “The Boat,” or war sucks, in case you need another reminder. –August 31, 2019
Russian Ark
Russian Ark is a ludicrously ambitious exercise in single-take filmmaking that runs to 96 minutes, moving through dozens of rooms in the Hermitage Museum, recounting a few hundred years of Russian history, and no one trips. –January 31, 2019
No Man’s Land
“A pessimist thinks things can’t be worse. An optimist knows they can.” Danis Tanović’s No Man’s Land (2001) is a real bummer. It is also a thoughtful consideration of why and how conflict rises among like-seeming people, and how that conflict threatens certain basic beliefs many of us hold in common, as in the pursuit of self-interest… Continue reading No Man’s Land
Breaking the Waves
“You cannot love words. You can’t be in love with a word. You can only love another human being. That’s perfection.” Because high schoolers often read and dislike William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” thoughtful teachers seek contemporary tie-ins to enliven an old story of young love gone wrong. In 1996, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo +Juliet fit… Continue reading Breaking the Waves
Wind River
When Hawkeye isn’t cleaning up after the other Avengers, he’s working for the Fish and Wildlife Department, solving the murder of a Native American woman in Wind River and revenge never felt so good. –June 30, 2018
Tower
Take 1: One day worth an essay. Take 2: Non-fiction animation is rare, and Tower performs its magic by enlivening testimony with re-enactments to heal from a then-50-years old school shooting. –May 31, 2024
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
“Whistle While You Work!” Ba-da-dum-dee-dum-dee-doo. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is as dated and old fashioned as you might imagine, but it’s also the cornerstone of the house that Walt built. –April 30, 2018
Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance
Godfrey Reggio has a great name and a documentary trilogy that began with Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance to meditate on how screwy modern people are. For evidence: enjoy the time lapse footage he assembles of people checking out of a grocery store. –April 30, 2018
Pink Flamingos
Divine eats a dog turd, cannibals feast on humans, paraphilias are aired, and really grubby people pull at your eyes and ears for more than 90 minutes. Pink Flamingos is a negative classic, or anti-art punishment for attempted good taste. You’re on your own for needed therapy. –March 31, 2018
Super Fly
Youngblood Priest wants out of the game by selling enough coke to quit. Short on depth but long on swagger, Super Fly is worth watching for “Freddy’s Dead,” a cameo appearance by Curtis Mayfield, and the final fight where Priest beats crooked cops with slow motion karate. –March 31, 2018
El Topo
It’s a Western, sort of, and it’s bonkers. Combine a gunfighter with a naked boy, dwarfs, opaque symbolism, religious extremism, violence, maimed bodies, disease, surreal imagery, and a climactic self-immolation. El Topo: you’ll be sorry if you (don’t) see it? –March 31, 2018
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
“Jiggle King” Russ Meyer triumphs with a script co-written by Roger Ebert. It’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, an outstandingly obnoxious, Queer-phobic/philic, racist/tolerant, anti-/pro-woman, schizophrenic excitement that’s fully aware of its excess and celebrity focus in the late 1960s. –February 28, 2018
Kill Bill: Volume 1
Take 1: Beatrix Kiddo was left for dead while hugely pregnant. Waking up from a coma, sans baby, she hunts those responsible. Kill Bill: Volume 1 is the resulting masterwork of QT doing Etch A Sketch genre homage with all cylinders firing at once. Take 2: Kill Bill: Volume 1 is bloody and fast, genre bending, a jigsaw… Continue reading Kill Bill: Volume 1
Blue Ruin
Blue Ruin shows why complicated families and violence don’t mix. A story of vengeance tied to the POV of a modern hermit, it’s great. Highlights include dumpster diving for dinner, a men’s room stabbing, and a crossbow leg skewer. –January 31, 2018
