Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  I Was at Home, But... 2019

  ★★★★½ Watched 12 Feb 2019

  Schanelec's funniest film so far. But also tender, mysterious, polemical, hopeful.

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  The Dreamed Path 2016

  ★★★★½ Watched 01 Nov 2017

  Bresson comes to mind of course in the formal approach; Schanelec has always cited him as an influence, and now that for the first time she uses montage and shorter sequences it's even more obvious. What hit me the hardest, though, was that, story-wise, it's like a devastating variation on Rohmer's A Winter's Tale - that ending particularly. Best film of the year, easily.

Popular reviews

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  The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun 2015

  ★★★ Watched 24 Dec 2015

  All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl, as Godard is commonly misquoted. I for one would have been content with Freya Mavor's freckles and those big glasses. But okay, the car is cool too. The gun however complicates things so much that Joann Sfar spends ten minutes near the end to explain and recap the plot in a manner that pretty much ruins the film. A pity, because otherwise I really enjoyed this.

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  Hide and Seek 2014

  ★★★★ Watched 01 Feb 2016

  Joanna Coates' debut feature is a rare and fragile thing. Rare, because its exploration of a polyamorous utopia, while sexually frank, also retains an air of playful innocence. Fragile, because it understands its gentle pursuit of happiness as a work in progress that may seem silly to the outsider, yet defiantly refuses to put up any defences or justifications.

  It seems unlikely that Coates is aware of the work of German filmmaker Rudolf Thome, but within the first moments of…

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