Taipei Story is a haunting dissection of a relationship's collapse through the void of communication. Scene after scene, the protagonists sit across from each other in suffocating silence, as if they've exhausted all words, as if any further utterance would be one too many. I eventually lost count of how many questions remain suspended in the air during the film's two-hour runtime—scenes fading to black or the recipient of these inquiries remaining stubbornly mute. Some crucial characters never speak a…
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All About Lily Chou-Chou 2001
Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou-Chou is a movie that grabs you by the throat and forces you to remember what it felt like to be young, lost, and desperate for something—anything—to make you feel alive.
The film follows teenagers stumbling through the emotional minefield of adolescence, with the dreamy, sometimes even shoegazey music of fictional pop star Lily Chou-Chou serving as their only escape. Shot with a visual language that fluctuates between oversaturated beauty and washed-out despair, Iwai creates…
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It Follows 2014
After watching It Follows, I'm baffled by the take that it's just about STDs—this film deserves better than that reductive nonsense. STDs don't make you have more sex. "It", however, literally forces you to bang your way out of trouble. David Robert Mitchell isn't preaching safe-sex sermons; he's diving into how our hypersexualized culture has turned intimacy into a joyless transaction.
The teens are almost comically lethargic, approaching sex with all the enthusiasm of filing taxes and passing around existential…
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Satantango 1994
Béla Tarr's Sátántangó is a seven-hour descent into a Hungarian hellscape where every character is a scheming, miserable bastard, and I loved every second of it. Took me four weeks to finish because my brain needed therapy breaks between the accordion guy chugging leftover schnapps as though it's his last day on Earth and the camera lingering on a muddy puddle for 15 minutes like it's auditioning for the role of "nothingness" in a Beckett play. Pure cinematic masochism.
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