Joined January 2024 (although have gone back and logged some viewings from before that).
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On Dangerous Ground 1951
The film begins violently: a thunderous orchestra erupts the moment the titles appear. Bernard Herrmann’s pounding score sets the mood for the vicious urban crime drama to come. But half an hour in, director Nicholas Ray shifts gears and shows his hand. After a first act of blackest noir, belligerent cop Robert Ryan is exiled to a desolate snowy landscape where he falls in love. Noir melts away and the film becomes something part western, part fairytale.
Ray opens the…
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Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans 1927
Movies like this make me feel grateful to be alive.
As with his Faust, Murnau’s beguiling fantasy of reawakened love is by turns dark, funny, and joyous. Its aesthetic and tonal shifts flow directly out of the characters’ thoughts and feelings to the point that even the intertitles are stylised by them. Jonathan Rosenbaum has described the film as ‘visual music’; Murnau’s allusive imagery and graceful narrative rhythm also evoke poetry. Yet the fluid camera and quintessentially Expressionist style underline…
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The Brutalist 2024
It looks great. It’s on 70mm and it’s in VistaVision; I want to love it for that. But the fundamentals - character and story - are not nearly as refined as the images.
In particular, the fate of Guy Pearce’s character is so implausible that the entire film seems to shrivel up, diminished.
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Murder on the Orient Express 1974
Stodgy, but with two redeeming features. The first: Ingrid Bergman. The second: it is not the 2017 Kenneth Branagh version.
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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl 2024
I love The Wrong Trousers because it’s so sparing with dialogue, because it’s richly atmospheric and luxuriates in that atmosphere (Gromit following Feathers down those dark streets!), because its humour is witty and understated, because it’s tight and focused and perfectly paced, especially that glorious climax.
All this, then, explains why I did not love Vengeance Most Fowl.
Oh well.
(Gromit and Feathers are reliably delightful, though.)
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Leave Her to Heaven 1945
An astonishing, outrageous decadence. What can you do but gawp and gasp and laugh and thrill?
It is audacious in every regard: the startling demonic beauty of Gene Tierney; the intoxicating use of colour; the wildly Sirkian twists. Yet there is a point to all its extravagance, and it’s revealed by Stahl’s decision to quietly invite some sympathy for Ellen. She is a subversive riposte to the suffocating nuclear family.
Nothing can prepare you for the lake scene, a sequence which…
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