Thus far, my experience with the icy cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni has been, well, icy. In a good way, to be clear; I've loved every one of his I've seen to date, and all for similar reasons. He brilliantly bursts modern life's bubble, and captures the listless discord that trickles out like nobody else. The ennui suffocates, and I always go back to thinking in terms of temperature, because usually, the coldness of his work cuts like wire. In Blow…

"I am not dying to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch."

The Russo Brothers present: a literal evil theme park movie in which Chris Pratt braves the apocalypse to defend a warehouse full of Cabbage Patch Kids and He-Man merchandise. Deeply bleak film, somehow an entire step down from Cherry and The Gray Man, and the fact that such a thing is even possible is the most damning thing I can say about this. Actually no, because inexplicably, the best…

A mistranslated ode, a dirge played out of tune, a dream unfolding in the awkward state between sleep and waking life. Tarkovsky made his final two films outside of his native Russia, and both function as his musing on what it means to be adrift from the things you know, how decades of life and creation won't bring you closer to finding any sort of meaning, and will ironically make you more of a stranger. To me, this one sort…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone involved with The Evil Dead will eventually bury some money in the snow, and leave some puckish unfortunates to sift through the bloody mess that unravels in turn. Where the Coens found offbeat, soulful comedy in that theme, Raimi (unusually) plays it more restrained and melancholic, a bitter treatise on how sin sometimes just manifests as a result of desperation and bad circumstance. All threads become loose threads in time, and in…

"I'm still good meat!"

Live, die, repeat. Just under eleven years ago, when Edge of Tomorrow came out, the consensus was that it was the best video game movie not actually based on a game, so effectively did it capture the accumulation of knowledge and skill that comes from an ever-escalating number of runs. What Bong Joon-ho is interested in is who's holding the controller, and how much they really care about their avatar's ordeal when every reset brings so…

In which the quintessential American mythmaker prints the legend while the ink was still (relatively) fresh on the very frontier he made his name on spinning tales about. Though not John Ford's first western (by an even wider margin than I'd realised, by my count this was his 40th), it's a very elegant entry point into the unique style of visual poetry he captures landscapes with, and the lost souls he happens to find wandering them. Lured to Custer by…

Every world Mike Leigh creates is so thoroughly lived-in, dense with details that never even make it to the screen, so closely does each actor keep them contained within their character, entire lives we never quite become privy to. Despite the natural feelings that creates, or maybe because of it, Leigh's is a cinema of extremes, where characters are so intensely entrenched in their own perspective that even when they're not actually onscreen, their personality becomes a force in the…

"Man, the things you give up."

There's more than one way to escape from prison, because there's more than one place in which you're serving time. Past the concrete and the barbed wire are tougher structures to break out of, social and psychological barricades that keep a man hemmed in well past the end of his sentence. The role you play, the name you go by, the patterns that are so easy to fall into and so painful to break…

An odyssey across a country shuffling into modernity, where silver-tongued shysters talk of wires, grids, and instant communication, even as their path follows the exact same course as the wanderers of old. There's a lot I love about the Coens' restaging of the Odyssey in 1930s Mississippi, but above all might be its love for storytelling and narrative itself. Spinning yarns doesn't just pass the time before the dawn breaks, it gives life to a landscape, shapes a time, place…

An adaptation of an unfilmable novel whose trickiness to tackle comes, at least partially, from how cinematic Joyce's form is. In some ways, what's audacious in a work of modernist literature (the "Arranger" of the novel basically tells the story in montage) is standard film form, so I find the lapses into greater visual surrealism and relatively more straightforward recounting of the day to be as mixed an effect as it is mostly unsurprising. Some of it fails, some of…