Like maybe only an amateur can, Eagle Pennell created a lived-in, fully-realized world familiar from real life but foreign to movies, and he painted this canvas in slight variation for two and one-half inimitable films, using the same two actors and practically the same locations. If you were to take Budweiser, rodeos, and baseball caps—the red state signifiers that made American Sniper so much money—and invert them into Lone Star, bar brawls, and hats advertising Big Ag, you might be…
All the stars.
The kind of movie that, even on a third viewing, makes you ashamed of the last 100 movies you watched, the last 100 days you lived (or rather, didn't), your humdrum existence a pathetic placeholder for what should be called living. A film where not being loved is a kind of dying, where loving without loving is a way of killing.
Transcend life in art and art in life. Jean Cocteau is dead, forever and never. Believe…
Instead of triumph, film noir found beauty in the ineluctable fact that the bad guy dies at the end, and if we can call Armored Car Robbery beautiful, then what makes it gorgeous is structure like a freight train, a no-nonsense force barreling toward its conclusion only to slow down at the last minute for a single flourish, a solitary pirouette, which Fassbinder would turn into a dance of death in The American Soldier, stretching film noir to breaking point, to where you didn't know if it was silly or serious. And maybe you never did.
Agnès Varda likes daydreams, not psychology. Her movies jump not from one thing to the next but from one thing to a next, always opening, never closing. One film, a documentary made of fictional parts (Jane B. par Agnès V.), leads to another, a fiction made of documentary (Kung-fu Master!), starring Jane Birkin's daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, and Varda's son, Mathieu Demy.
Birkin said she wanted “to make a feature film about how I really am: jeans, old…
