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Transit 2018
On Christian Petzold's Transit for Bright Lights. Petzold's film left me lightly trembling when I left the theater almost three years ago. It has remained with me ever since.
By recontextualizing the story this way, Petzold renders it simultaneously more abstract (fascism and war in eternal recurrence) and more concrete and immediate (the views of civilization glimpsed from the train on the outskirts of the city are the views of refugees today, and will be the views of many more…
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Short Memory 1979
Its icy, Langian images, at once stately and foreboding, come courtesy of Rivette’s regular cinematographer William Lubtchansky and editor Nicole Lubtchansky, and along with a few of Rivette’s regular players the film features the director himself in his only extensive screen performance. Although the film manages to uncannily evoke and anticipate Rivette at regular intervals (in its ambient drone of…
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The Grand Budapest Hotel 2014
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
l went in to The Grand Budapest Hotel for the first time with great expectations born of a glowing review given to me by a dear friend. He described it as, "sentimental," that it "brings happiness, joy, and sadness." It is perhaps the film's amazing strength that despite what its title may suggest, it manages to evoke all of these emotions subtly, and quite wonderfully. Indeed, it did so in ways I did not expect. When I finished the film…
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Phantom Thread 2017
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Phantom Thread heralds the return of critical darlings Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis in what may be the latter's final outing as an actor. Set in the London fashion world of the 1950s, the film finds Anderson outside his native U.S. for the first time, though thematically still firmly in his comfort zone. Day-Lewis plays the brashly named Reynolds Woodcock, a sought-after dress maker and the latest in Anderson's line of obsessive, controlling, volatile male leads. Only this time,…
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