Letterboxd — Your life in film

Ravenously, exhaustingly sensual. It is perfectly calibrated in so many minute ways - the drape of fabric, the places where Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn shifts her accent to situate herself relative to the other characters, the placement of hands, the selection and ordering of music cues, the first shift from the luxurious warm golds inside the party to the cool night greens outside. The floating camera and constant rhythmic movement of the cast combine to create an unbearably blissful, trancelike state…

The film that inspired a hundred minecart levels in video games (this particular rewatch was precipitated by Mine Cart Carnage from Donkey Kong Country). If “anything goes” is this film’s mission statement, the amazing minecart sequence is its closing argument; buckle up kids, you’re going for a ride. And that’s what Temple of Doom really is, a spooked out rollercoaster where the joy is in being hurled from action setpiece, to gross-out gag, and back again, all the while safely…

BEST OF THE DECADE REWATCH

It's so easy to overlook the Dardenne brothers. They've been making knockout films for 25 years, but their work is the opposite of sexy. Their most commercially appealing films - the crime drama LORNA'S SILENCE or THE UNKNOWN GIRL, about a doctor trying to uncover the facts of a patient's death - are among their lesser efforts (still legit great), while low-concept movies about a girl looking for a job (ROSETTA), a grieving father (THE…

Pleasantly surprised how well this holds up. Verbinski is no Spielberg but he's sure as *hell* a better blockbuster craftsman than most. Honestly my only big complaint here is that at 143 minutes, this thing is just way too long -- it gets particularly bogged down with the constant leaving of, and returning to, the same room of shiny pirate treasure where the nebulous curse must be lifted (why does it have to be Turner's blood again? I'm really unclear…

The first (of several) Coen brothers films that I would very happily call "perfect", and still probably my favorite. The screenplay is the most airtight produced in English in the 1990s, using repeated lines and locations to structure an insanely knotty tangle of double crossings and hidden agendas that's so impenetrable that it almost can't have a structrure all its own. And I'm also besotted with how it uses arch, and partially made-up slang to craft a world, a power…

It can be difficult to think about this as anything other than the volcanic explosion into the world of Elizabeth Taylor as a fearless, unselfconscious (well, only self-conscious in good ways) Real Actress tackling a role that can easily be mishandled in a number of ways and, arguably, needs to be salvaged from the too-cunning opacity of Edward Albee's enormously strange finale. And Christ knows, Taylor is a mesmerising force here, clomping dowdily and snapping out invective and eating chicken…

One of those films that I saw just once, under adverse conditions, and found so powerful that 21 years later, I remembered shots, lines, and very nearly whole scenes intact. In some ways, it's showing its age as part of the '90s American indie scene (the cinematography has a certain clean flatness to it that's not good enough for the lively, warm precision of the setting), and I have no idea what somebody as reliable as Terence Blanchard thought was…

The Parallax View was too sensational and action packed for my tastes, and All the Presidents Men slightly too clinical and not quite enough of a bonafide thriller for my tastes. In that respect, at least, Klute is the solution to the Goldilocks conundrum I have with this tryptic of Alan Pakula conspiracy thrillers, as it treats its central investigation, the disappearance of a "normal" man who may have been hiding a disturbing and violent fixation with prostitutes, with the…