Possessor (2020): Totally worth a trip to the Starlight Drive-In (my first new movie in 7 months!). A slow, psychedelic body swap movie, punctuated with bursts of violence. There are some grisly and nightmarish scenes- I gasped out loud twice! It’s impossible to watch Possessor without picking out Brandon Cronenberg’s influences (his dad among them) […]
More movies I’ve watched and rated 5 stars this year! Rififi (1955): A noir jewel heist gone bad and probably the greatest heist movie I have ever seen. “The Stephanois” is manly, misogynistic, and devoted to honor among thieves. His safe cracking plan plays out as a brilliant, near-silent 28-minutes. It’s completely jaw-dropping and that […]
Not counting docs, these are the movies I’ve watched and rated 5 stars on Letterboxd this year! Fast Color (2018) I watched this one back in January and wrote at the time, “something about this year has made me a fount of blubbering emotion… I’m not sure if it’s the timing but Fast Color really […]
There could not be a more impressive and wonderful video store than Scarecrow. I read they’ve collected about 120,000 titles but even a fat figure like that seems low when you see their mammoth, wide-ranging selection. I hate to think of this store ever closing so when the owners announced they were struggling, I started […]
Because nothing says Christmas quite like wintery murder movies! Here are the movies I watched over the weekend to get into the holiday spirit: Home for the Holidays (1972): It’s Christmas time and four estranged sisters reluctantly return home to visit their their father on his death bed. He tells them he is being poisoned […]
Like so many foreign classics, I probably wouldn’t have seen these movies if it weren’t for Nate (we had ‘French movie day’ awhile back). I loved them, of course! The setting is beautiful Provence and the story has lots of juicy stuff: bunnies, betrayal, unrequited love, and REVENGE. Jean is a hunchback and a city […]
I loved Catherine Breillat’s The Sleeping Beauty so much, I immediately watched it a second time (both Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard are on Netflix Instant right now, heck yeah!). The story opens traditionally enough: a bad fairy curses baby Anastasia but three good fairies use their magic to soften the blow. Instead of dying, Anastasia […]
If you aren’t familiar with the comic book series (I only recently discovered it thru work), Adèle is a cynical writer/ investigator who solves occult mysteries in belle epoque Paris. Basically, she is fucking fierce. The movie is loosely based on a couple of Tardi’s stories and begins with a pterodactyl egg being hatched through […]
I’m mere hours away from a midnight screening at the Landmark Egyptian Theater and I can’t wait! Return to Oz is maybe the darkest Disney movie ever and one of my personal favorites. Critics panned it (Siskel and Ebert called it one of the worst movies of 1985) but weird kids like myself continue to […]
I LOVED this fairy tale as a child- I remember reading it and getting chills (my other favorite was the similarly dark “Robber Bridegroom”). Catherine Breillat’s re-interpretation has a nice frame tale of two sisters in the 1950s. They are reading the story aloud in the attic, picking on one another, and having adorable conversations […]
hometown unicorn 