I should preface this review by saying that I watched Shot Caller in a virtual movie night watch party with two of my IRL friends, and it wasn't what any of us really wanted to watch, but we struggled with some severe technical difficulties and ended up landing on it as something that we *could* watch together, whether or not any of us were particularly excited about it. So I was a bit disappointed, frustrated, and generally grumpy going into…

Small Axe is an extremely interesting project to me, as someone with very polarized views of film and television. Is it a television mini-series composed of five episodes, is it five distinct films collected together in an anthology, is it one seven-hour-long movie? I guess the anthology answer comes the closest, but what's so exciting about it for me is the way that it fits into all three categories. The first installment, Mangrove, is the closest to a stand-alone film,…

"Hey pretty girl, time to wake up."

There was a time not too long ago when if you asked me what my favorite movie was I might have told you Mulholland Drive. There's a lot going on in the film and I certainly won't claim to understand all of it (something I might have done when it was my "favorite movie"), but I do have a reading of it that seems to answer a lot of the questions it poses,…

Ever since I joined Letterboxd, nothing has scared me more than the idea of trying to write about 2001: A Space Odyssey. The fact that everything has "already been said" about this masterpiece has itself already been said so many times that there's not even an original means of expressing my lack of originality left at my disposal. So with the knowledge that I will probably never be able to fully encapsulate what makes this my favorite movie of all…