6u532b

Now THIS is cinema -- disgustingly digital!! Same problem as the original 5 flicks!! Popcorn cinema sucks so bad in the streaming era that this is an easy standout!! Fair play to all involved!!

Actually harrowing (now and then) and legitimately good. One of the five or six films ever made with mid-budget mid-'00s Aussie film aesthetic that actually works imo/feels international quality.

Watched on Sunday June 1, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 31, 2025.

Actually great and worthy cinema.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 25, 2025.

Works for me right up to the last 10 or so mins -- into the vibes (sort of) and gags, really over everything having to be "about" something or having deeper meaning etc. Something is wrong with the funding process for films if this is always gonna be a requirement -- why can't we just have a movie about a cool monkey toy that kills people or whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Honestly, could use some more plot.

This rocks, actually.

Amusingly incompetent for something occasionally so refined - begrudging 1.5 for Ayo (decent!) and the many departments who gave this a polished sheen (it's a proper movie). Rough script, whiffed scenes, wack flick.

Kinda annoying ending but mostly fun, with some great kills - vibe with the idea of a Hallmark movie being invaded by a 90s/00s-cusp slasher, though prefer Landon's particular brand of humour in Freaky's Freaky Friday (tbh The Hot Chick) horror-comedy riff than here, where the form does little to cover for its 'reliance on a tone of humour' vs. 'actual jokes' mode.

Reprehensible. All fan-film defenders should be murdered.

Not exactly good but also not without its merits - where III had me excited for another sequel, the somewhat sizeable dip in quality in this one (all while maintaining production standard of its predecessor) didn't exactly leave me clamouring for more.

Series really getting into goofy areas by this entry - it does extremely rock though. I also love Evil Dead II.

Plot bears a striking resemblance to Phantasm: Ravager. This is, of course, far better than Phantasm: Ravager.

Floored by how good this is - actually uncomfortable/'haunting' (for lack of a better term) phones away cinema. A dope tech demo, Gen X paranoia piece, haunted house movie, and mainstream formal experiment, going full bore on all four fronts for its respectably slim runtime.

The big takes here are extremely braindead - we are blessed that something like this made it to cinemas in 2025 thru major distributors.

Hard 3.5 to Black Bag's soft 3.5.

Found it kinda rough around the edges at first, but by the end came to the conclusion it actually rocks v hard!!

Love the ways in which Soderbergh aestheticizes of the limitations of digital footage here - a good salve to (underbaked examples of) celluloid fetishism. Koepp's script almost as strong as his fantastic early career fentanyl-pre-empting xmas movie Dark Angel.

This is also really funny.

Best spesh I've seen in ages - this bloke's very funny.

Probably the best one TBH

Real cool once it kicks into gear - that takes,, a while... Had a nice nap for like 20 mins then the vampires rocked up, viewed as intended.

Watched on Saturday March 1, 2025.

A fair bit of (fairly manageable but get if that's not your thing) CNC here - this is an actual banger through and through though. Feels genuinely radical; a v amusing spin on a lot of other 90s gay porn flicks I've encountered during my professional career.

Forgot to log this - probably one of the best films of all time(?)

V close to perfect imo, with a bad impulse right near the conclusion 😔

On the good end of the misery-core spectrum.

Surprised, but not surprised, to see this doing so well on here - not good!!

Total banger from the esteemed director of Wild Wild West, RV, and that film in which the (already blind item?) disgraced Kevin Spacey turns into a family cat.

Will we get a kids film this lit ever again? Unlikely - all movies are for cowards now.

Watched on Monday January 27, 2025.

Watched on Monday January 27, 2025.

Watched on Monday January 27, 2025.

Forgot I'd seen this before til around 20 mins in -- not really one for the vulgar auteurism stuff around Bay because a lot of his impulses greatly infuriate but this is world class at the stuff it does well. Infinitely enjoyable action sequences, a great concept, very entertaining contradictions between its pro-war/anti-war/pro-mercenary/anti-mercenary politics, especially given the goofy state of political discourse right now.

Defo rec trying this out if you haven't, you'll know pretty quickly if you don't vibe with it.

Watched on Saturday January 25, 2025.

Watched on Saturday January 25, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday January 21, 2025.

Very impressive stuff from Kansas Bowling, a sort-of Russ Meyer-paced anachronistic mondo-meets-white-coater-meets-roughie for the younger-Millenial/elder-Gen-Z outsider crew - naturally adjacent to some of Anna Biller's work but only because it shares some influence DNA.

Very keen to dip into the companion book I picked up a while ago.

Been like 20 years since I first saw this - a bit hard to tell if it's wholly successful but it's funny, it's lit and it rocks!! All-timer performance from Dafoe.

Actual banger - toned-down fuck-adjacent comedy-of-manners soft-Euro-arthouse-mode flick for the US audiences, with real disdain for its characters. You haters are taking crazy pills (nfi what the marketing has been like, so maybe you were sold something different).

Don't love the camera movements in about 40% of the scenes, could have used some saliva/juices - otherwise, pr much no notes.

Another self-serious mid-'10s trauma-core outing from Whannell lacking any of the fun of the very lit OG Universal Monsters films (with modernising elements that ruin the OGs' central conceit), another Christopher Abbott performance where I have no fucking idea what his character is/what he's trying to do, another gamma-fucked post-productioned-to-death day-for-night shoot, another show then tell jumpscare machine where the scares are often barely half-executed, another script clearly murdered by studio notes and test audiences, another flick that plays in the gore-zone that shies away from going full bore/having fun with it, another Wolf movie with a transformation scene wholly indebted to An American Werewolf in London that fails to capture its magic (let alone elevate or expand upon it), aye aye aye aye aye... 😥

Wolf-vision bits are inspired, and that Aussie bloke gives a good performance as "weird dude in the Oregon mountains".

Very sweet.

Botched.

Sometimes very fun mixed bag -- appreciate the ooky-spooky vibe, and Leslie Nielson/Adrienne Barbeau rocked!!

Without hyperbole, probably the best musical biopic/best CGI monkey movie ever made. Perfect for what it is - was incredibly skeptical of the gimmick but it works way better than having an actor or Williams playing himself.

Probably about to lose ~$200 million, and tbh, worth every penny.

Very fun airport novel trash that's ultimately far too stupid/on-the-nose/and-then-everybody-clapped/NYT-reader-core for it's own good. Compulsively watchable, totally and utterly weightless.

Achingly sad film. All of Larraín's impulses are incredibly dialed in here - bold when necessary, understated when it's right to be so - and Jolie is a perfect muse; knowing that elements of her own career mirror aspects of Callas' decline and able to trainwreck her own performance in overt and subtle ways when the film's hyper-reality and intentional anachronisms demand it.

Don't know what I was expecting here but certainly didn't expect to be so on its wavelength or so severely floored. Surprise crushing super-banger; very keen to check out Jackie and Spencer.

Untouchably dope and undeniably(*) great - crazy it took two (somewhat) irable early-career misfires for Eggers to find his footing/put out two of the strongest mainstream films of the 21st century.

Mindblowing how many times I must have seen this movie - most of the set-pieces etc.

I'm not really a Bond-head so not across the controversy over the series going silly, but have to say the humour in this is very grating (maybe preferable to some of the knowing soft-irony humour of the most recent ones, and their self-seriousness, but not something that can hold together across a near 130 min movie). A stack of the technical/stunt-work and the sets here are incredible though (not the on-shuttle space wire work - very bad!!), in service of a somewhat rough watch but undeniably impressive/better than the lazy CG work of the recent entries. Kind of worth watching for that alone, but also maybe not cos it's very annoying!!

Tossed this on after hearing a podcast where Roger Avary mentioned the villain is Elon Musk-coded. He is, and large elements of his villainous traits are eerily similar to those of Musk, but it's a less interesting observation than I'd hoped - there's no real commentary on the one-dimensional character, nor his nefarious aims, other than "he's evil"; a reflection of '79 anxieties about the future this probably isn't, far more in the mode of a studio scrambling to cash-in on Star Wars madness.

just posting for my year in review page - you already know... broadly unranked etc./treat the Kurosawas as one, two of these are shorts so idk, whatever helps you sleep at night

Us and the Night, Eephus, www.RachelOrmont.com and a couple of others are spiritually here as well (mad respect to Gooners and Wildmen of the Greater Toronto Area - both technically 2023 titles - too)

• A Different Man
• The Code
• Caught by the Tides
• Me and My Victim
• Madame Web
• Love in the Big City
• The Apprentice
• Messy
• Coreys
• Cloud

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

MIFF is back! But, like all things in 2021, MIFF is a little different this year. For the first time ever, the festival will be a hybrid format – spread between cinemas and online. MIFF returns to familiar theatres across Melbourne’s CBD while also expanding into the suburbs and regional centres, as well as streaming nationally via our new digital platform, MIFF Play.

1: Opening Night
2: Gala
3: Closing Night
4-5: Special Events
6-16: MIFF Premiere Fund
17-26: Headliners
27-36: Australian Films
37-69: Documentaries
70-141: Features (by region)

70-89: Asia Pacific
90-113: Europe
114-121: Latin America
122-132: North America
133-141: New Iranian Cinema

142-151: Music on Film
152-158: Films on Film
159-167: Night Shift
168-172: Experimentations
173-176: Céline Sciamma Selects
177-183: Restorations
184-193: Collectives
194-272: Shorts
273-282: XR

MIFF Talks:

Art of the Score - The Music of Horror
Consuming Culture - Pandemic Habits
Family Affair - Filmmakers Share Their Lives
Folk Heroes - Documenting Artists and Icons
In Conversation - A Tribute to David McComb
In Conversation - Courtney Barnett and Danny Cohen
In Conversation - Leah Purcell
In Conversation - Nitram
Iranian Cinema Roundtable
Queer Activism
Table Read - Love Serenade

Other Special Events:

The Songs of David McComb and The Triffids
MIFF x Supernormal: Roadrunner
Those Left Waiting
Flow - Vision of Time
Piano Under the Stars

1. The Drover's Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson
2. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
3. Language Lessons
4. Those Left Waiting
5. Two Hands
6. Ablaze
7. Anonymous Club
8. Chef Antonio's Recipes for Revolution
9. Hating Peter Tatchell
10. Little Tornadoes

...plus 271 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Sticking it to those cowards at Letterboxd, all of these are under 1000 views and 1000% worth your time - sorted by watch #

HM: Uncle Kent / Thank You For Playing

• Empire Builder
• Softness of Bodies
• i hate myself :)
• Dead Hands Dig Deep
• Twilight Portrait
• Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project
• Profile
• Everybody’s Everything
• Fighting in the Age of Loneliness
• The Heart Machine

A complete list of films (inc. shorts) playing at Sydney Film Festival's 2018 edition, sorted alphabetically, grouped by program strand - my old site 4:3's solid(-esque) analysis of the program can be found here.

Full program is categorized as follows:

1-12: Official Competition
13: Opening Night
14: Closing Night
15-29: Special Presentations at the State
30-39: Europe! Voices of Women in Film
40-44: Focus on Italy
45-52: Flux - Art + Film
53-97: Features
98-134: International Documentaries
135-139: Family Films
140-142: Screenability
143-145: Sounds on Screen
146-152: Freak Me Out
153-157: First Nations - A Celebration
158-176: Retrospective - From Little Things Big Things Grow
177-186: Documentary Australia Foundation Award
187-196: Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films
197-221: Short Films
222-250: Animated Shorts
251-256: Classics Restored
257-266: Essential Kaurismaki - Selected by David Stratton
267-274: Late Announce

Note: Deep State (episodes 1 & 2) from television strand The Box Set is not listed

1. Ága
2. BlacKkKlansman
3. Daughter of Mine
4. The Heiresses
5. Jirga
6. Leave No Trace
7. Matangi / Maya / M.I.A.
8. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
9. One Day
10. The Seen and Unseen

...plus 263 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Entitled ‘Black Light’, the Retrospective at this year’s Locarno Film Festival offers an unprecedented overview of black cinema. Focusing on 20th century full-length features, the Retrospective takes in well-known cult directors, race movies of the 1920s and 1930s, pioneering works, landmarks of Seventies Blaxploitation, plus flmmakers who interpreted or captured on screen the race politics of their time. The main aim of the selection is to go beyond the concept of Black as societal identity to explore the imagery used by flmmakers who have addressed the historical and political issues at different times and in different places, exploring the challenges of being black outside the African context and its societies.

Black Light focuses on cinemas in North and South America and in Europe, with directors from a variety of ethnic and professional backgrounds, as the foundational material for its historical and critical vision. The Retrospective of the 72nd Locarno Film Festival puts forward a counter-history, highlighting little known works often omitted from the Western canon.

Piazza Grande pays its own tribute to the Retrospective with a Pre-Festival screening of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) on August 6th, treating the audience to a prestigious restored print marking the 30th anniversary of the flm. Curated by Greg de Cuir Jr., the Black Light Retrospective is presented tly with Cinémathèque suisse.

The project also involves prestigious Swiss and international institutions which together will create a circuit allowing the Retrospective to travel well into 2020. Among those already lined up are: Cinémathèque suisse, Cinema REX Bern, Filmpodium Zürich, the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, Arsenal in Berlin, and Cineteca Madrid.

• Within Our Gates
• Borderline
• Dainah the Mixed
• The Blood of Jesus
• One Way or Another
• No Way Out
• Odds Against Tomorrow
• Black Orpheus
• The Cool World
• Black Girl

...plus 36 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1-10: Late Announce
11: Opening Night
12-23: Official Competition
24-38: Special Presentations at the State
39-82: Features
83-117: International Documentaries
118-123: Sounds on Screen
124-133: Europe! Voices of Women in Film
134-137: Focus on New Zealand
138-141: First Nations
142-146: Flux: Art+Film
147-148: Screenability
149-155: Freak Me Out
156-162: Family Films
163-165: Classics Restored
166-169: All Night Cine-Love In
170-177: Documentary Australia Foundation Award
178-187: Viva Varda: A Retrospective of Agnes Varda
188-197: Essential Australian Woman Directors: 10 Trailblazers Selected by David Stratton
198-209: Short Films
210-211: Dendy Award for Australian Short Films

Missing:
SAVING SEAGRASS
WITKACY & MALINOWKSKI: A CINEMATIC SEANCE IN 23 SCENES
SANDGIRL
LAMBS OF GOD
MARTHA: A PICTURE STORY

Missing shorts:
BETWEEN TWO LINES
BLUE (Samantha Severin)
DOUG THE HUMAN
A DRONE OPERA
ELDERS
G.D.P.: GRANDMA'S DANGEROUS PROJECT
THE GRAVEDIGGER OF KAPU
HEARTH
HINEKURA
HUSH
A MATTER OF TIME
RU
SHED
TAKE
TIES THAT BIND
WAR MOTHERS: UNBREAKABLE
THE EGG
FEATHERWEIGHT
THE GRAVE OF ST ORAN
THE HITCHHIKER
I'M NOT HURTING YOU
JACKRABBIT
SNARE
SOHRAB AND RUSTIM
TASH

1. Booksmart
2. Diego Maradona
3. Invisible Life
4. Les Misérables
5. Official Secrets
6. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
7. Song Without a Name
8. Sorry We Missed You
9. The Unknown Saint
10. The Whistlers

...plus 201 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The most memorably bad things I saw last year - I probably (definitely) saw some worse films (none of this was for my job) but these all either stuck with me as uniquely terrible or were (in the case of 2, 3 and 5) so insanely forgettable that I can pretty much only my disdain for them.

1. Sicario: Day of the Soldado

   Technically proficient w/ decent performances but nothing rubbed me the wrong way more than Soldado, this year; insufferable, offensive (not for those reasons) and most egregiously boring - misses the point of its predecessor entirely (unless I did?), becoming exactly what it rallied against, with extremely dull action choreography, more interested in brutality than working within logical time/space constraints

2. Escape Plan 2: Hades

   Can hardly even this - apart from it being on the more egregious end of the DTV, all budget on brief cameos from big names, spectrum

3. The Cloverfield Paradox

   Genius marketing exercise, atrocious film - completely unsurprising this got shelved for years

4. Tomb Raider

   Facsimile of all the worst aspects of the new video-game reboot, mixed with the most boring aspects of the original films - there's literal waypoints and coloured pick-ups in the combat sequences, but not in the fun/goofy way one might expect

5. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween

   Again, can hardly even this other than thinking it'd probably bore most kids - huge step down from its mediocre predecessor

6. The Nun

   Made one of the only things that worked about The Conjuring 2 non-functional, laughably bad/unfinished

7. Ocean's Eight

   No stakes, no tension, no jokes, insufferable soundtrack, someone tell everyone involved that women are fallible - ignorance of this fact undercut and ruined the film in every conceivable way (save for Hathaway performance and Bullock/Blanchett fan-fic relationship)

8. The Girl in the Spider's Web

   Like 3 minutes of a good action movie - completely uncompelling (sorry Fede, you got dealt a rough hand)

9. Human Flow

   Terrible documentary, worse art film, egregiously overlong

10. Capernaum

    The more I reflect on this, the more I hate it - tedious, hack arthouse misery porn that's getting a free cos it's subtitled

Vaguely ranked (but not really exc. #1), here's a stack of films that have stuck w/ me this year. Some glaring omissions (Diamantino, The Trial etc) which I think are better than stacks of these but w/e, this list isn't comprehensive etc etc

1. First Reformed
2. You Were Never Really Here
3. Phantom Thread
4. Profile
5. Holiday
6. Climax
7. Let the Corpses Tan
8. Burning
9. Milla
10. Birds of age

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Mega Time Squad
• Mandy
• An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
• Let the Corpses Tan
• Downrange
• The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned from a Mythical Man
• Liquid Sky
• Blaze
• Behind the Curve
• Bugs

...plus 29 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Yo! Only counting stuff that I saw this year (sorry Entertainment) going off festival dates not US with maybe one or two (Mustang?) 2015's slipping in due to a 2016 theatrical.

1. Green Room
2. HyperNormalisation
3. Despite the Night
4. Cameraperson
5. American Honey
6. The Demons
7. The Wailing
8. Suntan
9. The Fits
10. Short Stay

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I own all but 5 of these and have (embarrassingly) seen none - should be a good exercise in forcing me to actually watch them!

EDIT: Ret-con for success! Will get to Scream Blacula Scream and Witchfinder General in the coming days but for now Society and Raising Cain will suffice.

1. Halloween III: Season of the Witch
2. Blacula
3. Children of the Corn
4. Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice
5. Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest
6. Zombie Flesh Eaters 2
7. Eyes Without a Face
8. Spiderwebhouse
9. Rabid
10. Island of Death

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My contribution to the Bottom 100 poll

1. Killer Klowns from Kansas on Krack
2. InAPPropriate Comedy
3. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
4. Manos: The Hands of Fate
5. Santa with Muscles
6. Smiley
7. The Devil Inside
8. A Nightmare on Elm Street
9. Anus Magillicutty
10. Movie 43