Peak cinematic art: poetry, lust, tragedy, spectacle, redemption. The fact that a movie like this, such an exquisite fusion of image and emotion, doesn't even have a Wikipedia page is enough to make you wonder if we really understand the history of cinema. Perhaps the silent era came and went before it could be truly appreciated. By the time the medium was reaching its maturity, it had become obsolete. "And they woke up under the enchantment of the palms."
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Sound of the Mountain 1954
Painfully moving. You can watch any number of Ozu movies and come away with a basically positive view of the ups and downs of family life. Then you watch something like this by Naruse and it all falls to pieces. The Japanese household as a source of bottomless confusion and misunderstanding. The patriarch is in a bubble, only in brief moments does the truth surface and even then it is distant, obscure, dimly felt but never grasped. Naruse is a sculptor, not just of the unspoken, but of the uncanny.
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Cemetery Man 1994
Constant rule-changes made it hard to engage with. The way the plot should have gone is this: Gnaghi is a shadowy, grotesque Phantom of the opera/Hunchback of Notre Dame figure who lives in the cemetery as an outcast and keeps evil at bay, protecting the town from its own demons. He is in love from a distance with Anna Falchi, beautiful and recently widowed secretary to Rupert Everett, the evil town mayor secretly killing people as part of a Satanic…
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Brainstorm 1965
Basically TV filler. Nothing is quite dangerous, alluring, or clever enough. The direction adds nothing and the acting is truly B-level. The think-piece psych-ward stuff does not mix well with straight-ahead Big Sleep-type noir. I think it really wants to be a sci-fi film. It should have revolved around the main character's scientific research getting out of hand. That could have been interesting. Instead, the science angle falls away as utterly superfluous.
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