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Porcelain War 2024
A Ukraine documentary about the nobility of creating art during wartime. It really hammers its metaphors home in a way that ultimately felt reductive. There’s a cute dog, I guess, but not very impactful, given the stakes.
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Vertigo 1958
Hitchcock’s masterwork, better than any other, reminds us of two truisms of cinema: to look is to remember and to remember is to impose. The hypnotic spirals that haunt every facet of the visual design and even the trademark dolly zoom effect take us deeper into the image, to the point that it threatens to swallow us, much as the past threatens to engulf Scottie. Of course these geometrical chasms are metaphorically vaginal, making Vertigo the great masterpiece about sexual…
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Simple Men 1992
Practically no director is better at framing his actors than Hartley, and that extreme, Bressonian formalism only further emphasizes the self-aware distance of his dialogue. Simple Men is something of a miracle... a send-up of male melodrama that still manages to pack an emotional wallop (that closing shot!). Direct yet layered, it rewards active viewership in a way that few comedies do.
90/100
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