Breillat really benefits here from a story that is not hers, allowing her to focus on the form. She has always been the best filmmaker for candidly addressing sexual allure without trying to scold or trap her characters. We can be honest, though, and say that she was never the best plotter. Even her best movies, like Fat Girl, are essentially plotless and get away with it via their visual alacrity and honesty.
Like Twin Peaks: The Return, this last…
I think I've found my number one rule for liking a movie: if there's the possibility for perversion in a given premise, the director acknowledges it. When there are two Mickeys here, I immediately thought, Oh, what about a three-way?—and the movie met me there.
Great flick that I can tell is falling on deaf liberal ears—those who read Ruffalo as Trump when, really, the critique is much more incisive, if broader. The crosshairs are aimed more strictly at pharmaceuticals,…
This may be a top ten film for me. It may have to do with being the youngest of three boys in a Catholic family. What Malle does that is so impressive is present symbolically rich images and dialogue without being overt like Bergman, glacially poetic like Tarkovsky, or metaphorical like Lynch—or anyone else you want to put forward. He uses the medium of film in a way that is firmly in the realist camp but constantly heaps on complexity…
Movies are dreams. You can learn a lot about a director by how they handle dreams in their films. Karras's dream in The Exorcist is spectacular and should've been the tone of this entire movie.
For Eggers, dreams are literal—showing information essential to the plot and recreating the film's world exactly as it is. His film-school obsession with literal recreation (era-accurate costumes, etc.) hollows out the movie’s aesthetic, political, and surreal potential, rendering most performances flat (with the exception of Dafoe, who seems like he’s acting in a completely different film).
Sadly, The Witch appears to have been a one-off.
