Pompeii 2014
★★★ Watched 22 Oct, 2018
I found it hard to believe that so many people whose opinions I respect have championed this film so vocally. I think I would have appreciated it as a disaster film regardless, one which works as a story even before the sky falls, but their high praise did encourage me to give it the benefit of the doubt as something more. Indeed, more it is, as Paul W.S. Anderson uses devastating romantic images and tragic circumstances to concoct a class singularity in which the great equalizer is death. Dying as revolution.
Sid & Nancy 1986
★★★ Watched 22 Oct, 2018
Alex Cox nails the grimy, scuzzy punk aesthetic with trash strewn interiors and graffiti'd walls while documenting the doomed spiral of a helpless iconoclast and his enabling lover. Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb are as repellant and obnoxious as a burp in the face, but their child like innocence compels us to care. It's a story of unconditional love that only falters in its monotonous structure as our stars plummet faster and faster towards the earth.
The Rider 2017
★★★★ Watched 23 Oct, 2018
Chloe Zao delicately blurs the line between film and documentary elevating real life relationships and circumstances with cinematic language. The Rider is a Dogma 95 inversion which marries stylistic artifice to barely refined substance. Its an inviting contradiction which builds trust through the transparency of its fiction. Quite a feat.
The Night Comes for Us 2018
★★★ Watched 24 Oct, 2018
Nimble Indonesians in gnarly knife fights nullify nonsensical narrative.
Phase IV 1974
★★★★★ Watched 24 Oct, 2018
Do you like horror? Hard science fiction? Disaster flicks? B movies? Nature documentaries? Trippy art house visuals?
You should watch this movie.