Late-era Godard, after he stopped paying even the slightest lip service to pedestrian concepts like plot, character development, or through lines, seems to have just sequestered himself in his studio, cutting videotape in various ways until the iterations became just a bubbling soup of images and washed-out visual schmattes, feels like the video equivalent to a hip-hop producer layering sample on top of sample until something coherent (hopefully) comes through.

These son-et-lumière collages aren’t connected to any reality an outsider…

Well, that was the best kind of complicated.

All three women have issues and psychoses that just happen to overlap with each other, and for a film where everyone suddenly, drastically changes places & personalities at the midpoint, it is spectacularly well-constructed.

Without Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, both incandescently good here, carrying us through this surreal, dense story with absolute skill, strength, and confidence, it would have fallen apart after an hour. But they (and eminence grise Janice Rule, who…

I don’t know if I can do this movie justice.

It’s not that this isn’t a movie about WWII, or the injustices served upon children during wartime, or the significant, if limited, power of friendship, or how a constant threat from the outside world can create a bunker mentality, especially among children who are just learning about how it all works, or how small moments of empathy can bring light into the world, even where it is most dark.

It’s…