But having rated it five stars, I'm not sure if I ever want to do this to myself again. It was my first time in the theater, and I forgot that on my previous viewing at home I paused a couple times (toilet break, water). In the theater, there is no escape, and I seriously contemplated fleeing a couple times, just because I found the film so effectively anxiety-inducing.

ERASERHEAD is a miracle of sound design, of no-budget imagination, of…

Perhaps you're like me, and haven't seen much Davies, but you've seen enough Loach and Leigh to feel like you've got the measure of things when it comes to British kitchen-sink miserablism, and autobiographical coming of age stories have no special appeal for you, and you saw THE HOUSE OF MIRTH sixteen years ago and it quickly faded into a miasma of costume dramas, bubbling between THE END OF THE AFFAIR and AN IDEAL HUSBAND and a el of Austen…

Had fond memories of this from the theatrical viewing, but man the 90s music choices and comical hacking scenes date it in the worst ways; more than that, it just feels very between, recognizing that Bond's sexism is outdated but unsure what to do with that fact, and while Brosnan nails his silly scenes and his serious scenes they don't cohere fully into a single Bond. Everyone (especially Martin Campbell, in his first reinvention of the character) feels most at…

The greatest mystery of THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME is that at some points it feels like it contains the world, and other times it feels like it contains nothing at all. Perhaps it's part and parcel for a film about a larger than life businessman (Benicio del Toro, in a part conceived for and possibly too written for him) who uses hopes and dreams to conjure grand plans out of insufficient resources - a text that is itself simultaneously echoing film…