6u532b

This film is uneven and heavy handed, absolutely, and some of the sayings and characters haven’t aged well (looking directly at you, Stalinists), but you know, showing direct action, unions organizing, and people banding together to fight fascism should never, ever, ever, ever, ever go out of style.

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 could recognize, and there is of course no plot to speak of, past (maybe) a general theme of “society in conflict.” But really, this is just a brain-dump (or rather, a film-library-dump) of the ramblings of someone with a massive cinematic vocabulary, and a deep belief in his own genius.

This isn’t for a movie night, but if you’re in a certain type of scene, this could work just fine playing in the background at an arty house party. And of course, if you’re looking for some visual artistic inspiration, there’s plenty to look at. Either way, it's a good test of how irredeemably damaged your attention span actually is.

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 looms as large as the grotesquely amazing murals her character paints all over town) are more than equal to this story.

In retrospect, there are a ton of movies since that have drawn from this one. And hell yes for that.

Noir don’t get much noirer than this. The plot is like an egg that has been hard-boiling all day, until the water is gone and there’s nothing left but scorched pans and regret. No one is guilty (well, okay, everybody is). Everyone drinks straight whiskey out of juice tumblers, and no room is even close to adequately lit; their eyes are gonna go bad by middle age (which, well, it doesn’t seem like anyone here will live long enough for this to be a problem).

And Jean Paul Belmondo is, by a long wobbly nose, the hottest ugly guy in film history. If I could wear a trenchcoat as suavely as he does, I’d never wear anything else.

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 all of those things, told with a pace and inevitability that is remarkable in its restraint. But it’s the friendship at its core, between Julien (who we know will turn out fine) and Jean (who we know… won’t), that serves as the bright, warming flame dividing everyone in this Catholic school in the woods down the middle, between those who choose humanity, and those who follow the orders of their superiors.

I’m jealous of their friendship, and I’m grateful for knowing about a history that I really, really want to not repeat.

Old gritty filthy NYC benefited from some great filmmakers, but there’s a reason it’s become such a mythical place in modern culture. You really felt like anything was possible; a street hustler could dream of becoming a king, and the richest bastard could get cut down to nothing by making one wrong move. It was equal parts scary and exciting, and that makes for (among other things) great art.

Al Pacino’s wild charisma, intensity, and insanely huge eyes made him the easiest bet on the table to hit big after this, his debut film, and he’s been playing a variation on this character for much of the last half century (to great effect), but Kitty Winn more than holds her own opposite him, and her character’s progression, from sweet street kid (living with Raul Julia, in his film debut), to seasoned junkie turning tricks for smack, to desperate police informant, is what carries this movie along, leaving Pacino’s Bobby free to throw emotional grenades in every scene. You cheer for her to get it together, even though you know she almost certainly never will.

This is in no way a happy movie, but there is plenty of dark beauty in it, and while you might be triggered (or squicked out) by the half-dozen separate scenes with people shooting up, Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne’s script leaves plenty of room for the characters to breathe (or, sometimes, to not breathe).

If you have as soft a spot for scummy 70s New York City as I do, this is a real gem.

These four half-hour shorts, all somehow (very loosely) connected to the idea of dangers of modernism, are way too varied in quality to cohere. This was a project that it seems the four directors didn't really confer on much, and as such the varied effort and quality levels were a bit jarring.

1) Rossellini, “Chastity” - God, air travel was just so different back then. Such massive space and comfort. But incels have always been with us, haven’t they. (This was the worst segment of the four. Rossellini seems to have pulled a half-baked subplot out of his junk drawer here.)

2) Godard, “The New World” - A nuclear weapon goes off over Paris, and the only one to notice is this one guy, whose girlfriend suddenly speaks in riddles, everyone else in the city is sick, and the tops of the buildings have all disappeared in the fog. Yet another in a long line of Godard films about how he's the only sane one, and even his (always amazingly hot) girlfriend doesn't understand him.

3) Pasolini, “La Ricotta” - Pasolini’s piece begins with a segment in full technicolor depicting the filming of the crucifixion in a small town (directed by Orson Welles, imperious as ever), and following two dark, smoky B&W segments, it’s jarring. But this is the only segment that shows any joy whatsoever, even as the starving actor at the center of the story comes to a gruesome (if appropriately silly) end.

4) Gregoretti, “Free Range Chicken” - The last piece involves a family of four constantly tempted by modern consumerism, intercut with a market guru delivering a dry, soulless address (through a laryngectomy throat mic) about maximizing consumer trends.

The eventual fever break of the parents, while walking through an overpriced future construction site, is a good note to end this set on, and I guess it brackets the Rossellini opener well enough, with its slavish corporate message. But while Gregoretti’s piece is comparatively well paced and developed, Pasolini’s piece is the only section I suspect I’ll take with me.

For me, Louis Garrel and Noémie Merlant, of all people, taking basic acting lessons from an ex-con (even if it's from Roschdy Zem, who is absolutely no slouch) was the moment where I felt I could relax into this movie, knowing everyone wasn't slumming it for a project. This might be a silly little heist film, but it has no small amount of heft and heart, and everyone holds up their end with verve and charm.

Also, good to know that Merlant can play het.

This feels like a companion piece to Last Night At Marienbad, another classic film with Delphine Seyrig, in an ultra-stylized reality that was equal parts languidly detached and intensely sexualized, all the emotions smoldering yet internal.

The entire film is shot with voiceover conversations between unnamed people describing the action, but the conceit allows Seyrig to move unencumbered about the screen in a series of brightly-colored dresses that contrast with the various men, all of whom are dressed (or undressed) in black & white.

Duras’ patience with the camera is unequaled. The movie opens with a long, complete shot of a sunset, and she keeps the pace slow, so you can take in every wave of the curtains, every wisp of smoke, every breath Seyrig takes, as her various suitors drift through the ornate ballrooms and stroke her hair. When she dances with her paramours, they move so slowly they’re often just standing there. The shafts of light through the dusty windows are each a fully fleshed out character of their own.

The first (only) voice heard in the room in the whole film, an extended cry of anguish from her spurned husband, comes from offscreen and (eventually, eventually) fades into the distance, while Seyrig’s character stands still, stiff, letting the storm , just another local monsoon.

India Song is just such a comforting, invigorating warm bath of style, mood, and patience. It allows the star at its core to shine brighter than any of the diamonds on her neck.

So, the soullessly raunchy opening, the hyper-masculine firefighting sequences, the autosexual… sideplot? subplot? plot? , the serial killing, the pregnancy, all of it feels like noise around the basic story of two (extremely, extremely) messed-up people, who somehow find a way to cling to each other through the darkest period in either of their lives.

This was like eight decent movies, all of different genres, crammed together. You could make a long, successful directing career out of just the pieces of this film. But to be fair, it is exceedingly well-executed.

If you didn't get to watch Sesame Street in the 1970s, well, it was a lot like this (except for the gunshot sequence, which... uh). Just a lovely and simple little play exercise that no doubt was as much fun for Kiarostami to make as it is for me & my kid to watch.

(Watched it again, as I'm taking a French class, and we're studying dialogue.)

On rewatch, the characters, for the most part, do not hold up well, nor does the plot, which has some massive holes. The comedy, the pathos, the thrillery bits, the romantic sequences, and the ending really, truly don't line up with each other. (And to have her long-lost son be a stalker is a real choice.) But the technical touches and the mastery of the cinematographers is unmistakeable. This movie looks amazing.

And again, Virginie Efira carries this thing on her back.

Jeanne Moreau with no fucks to give is worth every minute.

The simple plot stays out of the way of the fun stuff, which is the point of a flick like this. You’re not here for the multilayered plot. You’re here to watch Jeanne Moreau be an ice cold killer, gleefully offing incels and dullards in new and exciting ways.

I get that Truffaut was trying to do Hitchcock here, and he might feel like he failed at that, but as a fun little 5-chapter revenge fantasy, it hums along just fine. Don’t overthink it.

This is s Ha if she lived in LA and was a hundred times more socially awkward

It's rare to see a silent melodrama paced so evenly and patiently. Chaplin frames a lot of shots in ways that are rather ahead of his time, which gives Edna Purviance (and the rest of the cast) lots of room to be more real in the context of the story. It feels ... more contemporary.

Special shoutout to Young Jeremy Irons as the tortured artist, and Flapper Parker Posey as the catty best friend.

(One plot question: How did Marie get such an ultra-swanky apartment, with two extremely loyal maids, in just one year? I mean, it turns out the flat wasn't her caddish boyfriend's, and there was no talk of her having anything resembling a job. No shame, and good on her, but -- I get the sense there was an extra backstory there, is all.)

So, Albert Dupontel is kinda the French Albert Brooks, then? A comic actor who made sharp little films about modern society & the struggles of middle age? I'm in.

The plot is a little all over the place, and the secondary characters are kind of one note (the stalker! The blind librarian! The soulless apparatchik!), but there is a charm to the whole thing.

And Virginie Efira is an absolute treasure.

Chantal Akerman’s life’s work involved showing quiet Dalloway-esque women with lots of life still in them, yet who are trapped in boxes by society, caged birds that sing, Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique made flesh.

This character sketch is presented as an uninterrupted monologue, but clearly, Akerman has edited her questions out, so the only voice you hear is Chris Myllykoski’s, talking in voiceover about her tiny pretty life, her friends, her husband, her neighbors, her self-image, the raindrops popping on the windows, the monotony and occasional vague danger of her days, while she moves about her Paris home in a sleeveless dress, smoking, making coffee, eating bread, sitting or standing quietly, the sunlight glowing brilliantly in her hair.

The pace here is slow, even by Akerman’s standards, but the extra space allows you to focus on the air in the room, the dust floating as she fiddles with the contents of her purse, framed in windows, through doorways, over tables & sitting on her bed, while she talks about the joys and dangers of the world outside, the monotony of her life forming a frame within which she sits, confined, safe, observed, observable.

Excellent use of Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots" to show when Anne (Léa Drucker, who is the pillar of this film, around which the two less-fleshed-out male characters revolve) loses control of herself for the few brief moments that drive this drama along. The fact that she (mostly) maintains such control over herself, her family, and the situation she allows to happen is a testament to the internal strength of the character. Yes, it could have had a crazier ending, but I'm kind of glad it didn't.

(I haven't seen the original, which I take it is a lot more wrenching.)

Watching Tati in his early slapstick era is like watching a great Big Band, or an incredible mime, or a chamber quartet that moves you unexpectedly; popular entertainment as we know it has largely moved on, but it's obvious that this is a true master of visual comedy, at the height of his powers. Just a sublime series of set pieces, packed together & flowing perfectly.

And for a tall gawky guy, he can sure dance.

On its face, this is a simple love triangle between two brothers and a single mother, but there's an emotional warmth that fills this film, even as it becomes clear that the things each character want are (mostly) not going to happen.

All these characters do is their best, and that makes them utterly human to each other, and to us. And it turns out that the only way to get past the worst parts of yourself, of your life, is to own up to your imperfections, and take it one day at a time.

"What a rotten film. All we meet are crazy people."

Irredeemably awful people doing irredeemably awful things to each other and to the world around them. Everyone is miserable. And then, things get worse.

Godard was never much of an optimist, and here, his nihilism runs wild across the French countryside, and he lets his doom flag fly high. Art may or may not be dead, but here Godard is doing his damnedest to try and kill it. Maybe he just needed a hug and a cup of hot chocolate. And a nice long nap.

This movie follows a series of selfish, venal lizards stepping on each other to get whatever little trinket, or sexual release, or piece of some relative’s will, or leg up on whoever happens to be in front of them at any given moment. Godard is never one to use just one tracking or editing trick where he could fit six, but the humanity of his stories was rarely at the top of his priorities, and here, the actors & scenery become merely smashable items in his own personal rage room.

Final tally: 784 flaming car wrecks, 48 bodies, 600 buckets of blood. Joe Bob says check it out.

I haven't watched this since I was a kid, and I it being just so unbelievably sad. But the sad sequence isn't really that long, and the up note it ends on is glorious and satisfying.

And really, 1950's Paris, all smoke-gray, cramped, cobblestoned & street-sewaged, and yet as glorious and majestic as ever, is the other main character here. Well worth it.

I didn't even think to log this, but -- of course, yes. I may even put this in my Top Four.

This is the single greatest film to ever wind up on YouTube. Its layered magnificence brings me back again and again. I mean this seriously and unironically.

Yes, on one level it's a sadder, Frencher Royal Tenenbaums, but this story, about a dying dickish patriarch and his disintegrating family, gives every character lots of space to identify their own sadness, and explore their own independence. Everyone (somehow) got to where they are, and (somehow) they all have a way out.

Everyone here has a third dimension. These are people, not just characters, and as sad as they (mostly) are, their struggles are each in their own way compelling. It quietly smolders along, and it's well worth your time.

A standard silly little Mack Sennett slapstick short about a track meet and a lovelorn star more obsessed with her looks and her boyfriend than with athletics. It's pretty basic, except for Carole Lombard, who even as a teenager here is already very much... Carole Lombard.

This excellent documentary, about French feminism in the film industry (and outside of it), made me think a lot about the lines between how bad things were in the 1970s, and how (in a lot of ways) not much better they are now. (I'm thinking specifically about Adèle Haenel & what she's been going through right now.)

And why am I not surprised that Jane Fonda's French is pretty great? (Wait, she was married to Roger Vadim. That's going to help. Never mind.)

A solid short version of the classic tale, from an era where film editing and pacing were things that were still being worked out.

Yes, they could have taken three or four minutes out of the middle of this, but the two main actors (James Cruze & Florence La Badie) are absolutely fine, and complaining about length in a 12 minute film feels a little gauche.

Sure, it’s a heavy-handed religious hagiography, but it’s a biopic of a Catholic saint, so that comes with the territory.

The cliches in this film weren’t cliches when this film came out, just after WWII, when there were a lot of poor people (like, a lot), and the infrastructure to take care of them was in many places scarce at best. The message here is that charity, true charity, born of pure kindness and empathy for others, is virtually impossible, but you’ve got to try. It’s the only way to make the world better.

This film is not complicated in its story arc, but hits all the proper notes, and the Pierre Fresnay as Saint Vincent de Paul brings plenty of weight and skill.

Literally every 30 seconds, for the entire run of this movie, there was a moment where something completely bonkers happened that made you rethink everything that came before. This film is the alpha & omega of cinema in 92 incestuous, mistaken identity-packed, irredeemably insane minutes. When the all-nude WWII gas chamber sequence is just dropped in in the middle, honestly I just kinda thought, oh, hell, why not.

There's murderers bumping into other murderers while the murdering is still happening, everyone is accidentally schtupping a relative (or thinking they are but aren't), a new severed head appears every ten minutes like clockwork, a pet vulture gets shot multiple times, there's gratuitous Nazis, wigs wigs & more wigs... this is a true giallo art-trash apotheosis. John Waters & Almodovar have spent their whole careers trying to recreate this film.

Teenage Alligator ain't listening, Rusty, and neither is the goober tasked with evicting you for his summer job. Sucks, man. Sorry.

Pawlikowski is just such a master of framing, pacing, and cinematography, that he can take a road movie about two women, connected by blood but divided utterly by life experience, making peace with the holocaust, and evolve it into something even more poignant.

(That guy was nice, but when she got to "And then?", you realize that was immediate checkmate. He never stood a chance.)

Yes. Yes to Josh O’Connor and Carol Duarte, yes to simple special effects driving a well-executed grave-heist plot, yes to the kind of atmosphere and beauty that it seems only great Italian cinema (from Fellini to Pasolini to Antonioni to, well, Rohrwacher) can successfully execute, yes to switching effortlessly between buffoonery and emotional honesty, yes to Isabella Rossellini gleefully chewing scenery, yes to the sacrilege that everyone indulges in while paying lip service against, yes to every single frame of this lovely, lovely film, yes, I said yes I will yes.

May the light engulf you.

This amazing documentary is a chronicle of the beginnings of a reckoning that was over a century in coming, and the realization of how big the task of the Beninese cultural reclamation is going to be. The return of these 26 artifacts is a step in the right direction, but the righting of the cultural wrong is a much, much bigger lift than merely putting a handful of statues on a plane.

Mati Diop gives the first half of this doc to the pieces themselves, giving them a voice, bewildered at what's happened, where they're headed, what they might expect when they get there, what their future holds. It's only in the second half that she allows actual people from today -- students and scholars -- to come in and provide context in the form of a spirited public debate. It's a good conversation, well conducted.

The French looted thousands of these sacred artifacts over decades, and the modernized Benin that they’re returning to is one of discos, and motorcycles, and cell phones, and tourists, and those changes also affect the importance of these pieces. It’s heartening to see the debate continuing, but there is so much more to do.

"Maybe next year there won't be any stories."

A completely aimless hair-trigger dirtbag, a despondent immingrant living on a houseboat who shares his exact name (Rodolfo Cano), and Rodolfo 1's artsy girlfriend with one foot out the door. Rodolfo 1 has enlisted in the army on a whim, but Rodolfo 2 got the army's reply letter, and so a game of musical chairs ensues.

The plot is... enough. Sure, there could have been a bit of fleshing-out of what she was doing with this irredeemable man-child (she lacks direction too, but she's charming and crackles with energy through the entire film, while he stomps around like an over-sugared toddler in mid-tantrum, spending the back half of the film with "SHOOT HERE" scrawled across his chest), and Diaz carries huge parts of the film all by herself, with her perpetually disappointed stare and awkward Shelly Duvall-esque way of occupying space, but really, there's enough space here for everyone involved to have their moments of self-reflection.

Over the course of my life, I have been all three of these people, and I have lived, and partied, and fought, and made out, and woke up, in so very many places like this. I had vertigo through so much of this thing. I guess I'm just a sucker for movies like this, and I suspect at this point I always will be.

(Dance Version)

When it reached the dance sequence at the end, I realized how devoid of people the video had been. I guess that worked with the story.

(Crane version)

If this was a Youtube channel, I would happily and eagerly subscribe.

In which no one (until the final moments of the film) does the brave thing that would make everything work out for everyone, and so the slow collision between the businesspeople, their intermediaries, and the townspeople continues, uninterrupted and inevitable. When the film ended, I realized I had stopped breathing twenty minutes before.

The brutality of this film is part of its love and care. Balance, as is frequently mentioned in the movie, is key. That said, large parts of this movie seem to be shot from a camera mounted on a car, which gives a sense that we’re just ing through, and ively watching all this happen as we drive past. We’re not involved, we’re just ersby, tourists in their world. We’re the glampers, sitting in our world, watching theirs.

I shouldn’t be watching cold-weather movies in winter. I hate the cold, and this isn’t helping.

This documentary is utterly fascinating from tip to tail. It just covers so much ground. Holy crap.

It draws from so many stories, & it presents its thesis so simply and consistently. People who we (North Americans) were raised to believe were the great villains of the 20th century (specifically Khrushchev & Malcolm X) come off as the ones who actually knew what they were doing in this whole mess, and were more or less honest about what they were looking to have happen in Central Africa. (Not that I'm shocked, but here, the case is particularly well-made.)

You knew the CIA wouldn’t come off well here, and (ye gods) they really don’t, but man, there’s a special level of hell for the Belgian monarchy over this. It's well worth a watch, especially in 2025.

And the music is, of course, relentless and wonderful. Diz & Monk & Makeba & Satchmo & Bird were pawns in this game, but they came from a good place in all of this. And I have never heard Nina Simone be angry in a more apt context.

And they said mumblecore was dead.

A professor at a small women's college brings in her silver-fox actor uncle to finish a theater project after some drama with the previous director, and everyone's center of gravity moves, just a little, just enough.

It feels thrown together and autofiction-y, but there's enough dramatic tension -- a little heartbreak, a little faculty agita -- to make the characters compelling enough to watch & follow.

It's actually not a bad choice for your first Hong Sang-Soo -- it's pretty representative of his thing. If you dig this, there's tons more.

"Casablanca, but way gayer" is frankly convincing enough as a pitch, and that's before you get to god-tier Rita Hayworth.

And I loved the occasional bonkers camera angles. Putting one character at random in silhouette, people having intense conversations with the back of other people's heads... Charles Vidor was trying stuff out.

"The Spirit of Mumbai: You have to believe the illusion, or else you'll go mad."

Three women, all in different phases of life, all of them coming to with the fact that the thing they're waiting for isn't going to turn out the way they wanted, set in a Mumbai that feels so massively small, spotlit in small sections like being shot on a theater stage, and not among the relentless throbbing crowds of a cramped city of 20+ million people all sitting on top of each other.

The beauty of this film is unmistakable. Just a sweet little wonder of a story, set against a massive backdrop.

Watched this with my 4-year-old (his first-ever feature film taken in at one sitting), and he was enchanted. He's been singing "Chim Chim Cheree" for an hour.

Every time I watch this, it's reinforces to me how much of an absolute masterpiece it is. From the suffragette (& toxic masculinity) subplots to the running themes of empathy and work-life balance, this musical has aged remarkably well.

(My South London in-laws snarked on Dick Van Dyke's accent a bit, but even they were rapt through the whole thing.)

“Something’s wrong with me,” she tells her mother.
“I don’t have any friends. It’s a complete mystery to me,” she says.
”I thought everyone hated me, and it turns out that wasn’t true,” she says.

Lacy is a smart, perceptive, awkward pre-teen who isn’t getting the parental wisdom she needs to get through her childhood, stuck with a mother who’s even more emotionally lost than she is. Thing is, she’s smart enough to make it to adulthood just fine, but she needs that map, and she’s not going to get it from her mother, who’s spending her life hot-swapping gurus like partners at a square dance.

The three other adults who enter Lacy’s orbit (a migraine-addled boyfriend, a perceptive performer trying to escape a cult, and then the cult leader himself) are, for various reasons, of little actual help.

This movie is equal parts invasively empathetic and joyfully sad, and Julianne Nicholson & Zoe Ziegler are amazing. If you grew up in a household like this, just be warned, it’s gonna be absolutely devastating.

I'm gonna have to live with this one for a minute.

Yes, this 35-minute portrait of a young mother is long on self-reflection and short on plot, and you can see why Chantal Akerman might have abandoned it, but I'm choosing to believe this was a first draft of the concept that became Jeanne Dielman. You can see the pieces of her masterpiece already in place here.

There's less suppressed anger here (not none, but... less) than in Jeanne Dielman, for sure. A young mother, in conversation with a silent friend (Akerman), tending to her housework and her daughter, and reflecting aloud on the type of person she's become. It's occasionally rushed and frantic, and the editing is clearly rough at best, but the seeds of her future character studies, of women whose still waters run deep, is already very much in place.

The best you can do with a 15-minute film is to create a thought-shape, something that lasts in the viewer's mind, lay the proper groundwork for as deep an emotional payoff as you can muster in your runtime. And this one absolutely works.

The plot is simple, but the way it gets there, the framing (the main character's niqab is its own character, fully separate from the human being inside it), the pace, the payoff, all are suffused with a gorgeous mood. Well worth your time.

A nice little short about a filmmaker noping out of her production, to just blow off some steam at a karaoke bar and spend a day reminiscing about Vietnam with some guy.

This feels a bit like a wish-dream Mati Diop had on a particularly frustrating day shooting something else. But it's evocatively shot, and brings good depth to the concept, and you really feel for the director and the guy as they wander through the streets of Marseille and along the beach, often wordlessly.

One thing that seemed weird was that a lot of the shots were from far away (I'm guessing out of necessity, as they were walking through crowded streets or beaches), atop parking garages or from carnival rides, which gave the back half of the film a bit of a surveillancey feel I'm not sure was entirely intentional. But Diop knows what she's doing, and the film is absolutely fine.

I feel like I've seen tons of footage of Calabria -- my mother's family comes from there -- but never has it looked as beautiful as it does here.

That part of Italy doesn't have the best reputation for being welcoming to immigrants & strangers, so the warmth of this piece is so reassuring and welcoming. The hope the young mother and the young man have for their future, and how the community is so open to teaching them about the local ways of cooking & music, gives this whole film a real spiritual ease.

It's all shot in gentle, optimistic oranges & yellows, and while there isn't any real tension shown here, in this case, I think that's a real positive. Good-news stories about refugees are so rare, so it's so nice to see it working out for someone.

Alieu (the young man) seems like a genuine good egg, and his sense of sartorial style is just next level. If his football career doesn't pan out, he could get a job in a couture house. But he really, really has to learn how to twirl spaghetti.

If you're going to watch this, I recommend doing it with the sound off, as a kind of half-hour Qatsi-style experiment. The interviews are not enough to provide full context or entertain, unless you were in London at the time, in which case, go for it.

One thing a lot of African cinema shares is a sense of wide-openness, where everything you see is very close to the rest of the world. The sky, the earth, the sea, the cities, other people, all serve as grand frames against which the action & images happen (or exist, or whatever).

Not here. This short is... downright claustrophobic, in its tone and look. The fireside conversation between the three friends about whether to take a dangerous boat trip is shot so tightly, they could be talking from inside a closet instead of on the beach. I really hope those guys stay safe.

It's well worth 15 minutes of your time.

(With links to the relevant lists.)

Watch them in any order & at your own pace, but try to finish by 12/31/25. Or else... nothing, really. You do you.

Categories:
1. [X] Watch a film from the CC40 Boxset
2. [X] Watch a film from the year you were born
3. [X] Directed by Robert Altman
4. Watch a film that would be your first choice in the Criterion Closet
5. Great Soundtracks
6. John Turturro’s Adventures in Moviegoing
7. [X] 1920s
8. [X] Watch a film that will be added to the physical collection in 2025
9. [X] 1930s
10. Andrew Garfield’s Closet Picks
11. 1940s
12. Celine Song’s Top 10
13. [X] 1950s
14. Watch a film from the Criterion Channel’s all time favorites lists
15. [X] 1960s
16. Watch a film that is currently out of print from the physical collection
17. 1970s
18. William Friedkin’s Closet Picks
19. 1980s
20. Spine #451-499
21. 1990s
22. [X] Documentary
23. 2000s
24. [X] Janus Contemporaries
25. 2010s
26. Bill Hader’s Second Closet Picks
27. 2020s
28. Noir and Neonoir
29. All Time Top Criterion Closet Picks
30. [X] Criterion Releases Never Picked in the Closet
31. North American film
32. Ayo Edebiri’s Closet Picks
33. Wim Wenders’ Adventures in Moviegoing
34. South American film
35. Random Number Generator: 1 to 1335. Watch whatever movie corresponds to the spine number you are given.)
36. AAPI Filmmakers
37. Watch a film shorter than 80 minutes
38. [X] European film
39. Cult Movies
40. Isabella Rossellini’s Adventures in Moviegoing
41. [X] Winona Ryder’s Closet Picks
42. African film
43. John Carpenter’s Top 10
44. Horror
45. Asian film
46. Dark Comedies
47. Rachel Kushner’s Adventures in Moviegoing
48. Australian film
49. Female Filmmakers
50. Ben Wheatley’s Closet Picks
51. [X] A film by a director whose work you have not seen before
52. [X] Watch any Criterion film from your watchlist

Please use the tags "cc2025" and “criterion challenge 2025” so that we can keep track of everything, and link your lists in the comments below. Have fun!

1. Weekend
2. The Bride Wore Black
3. 3 Women
4. The Color of Pomegranates
5. Times Square
6. Divorce Italian Style
7. A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate
8. Last Summer
9. Life Is Ours
10. Tampopo

...plus 42 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My only hope is that this list gets longer and longer.

• Roma
• 8½
• PlayTime
• Young Frankenstein
• Chungking Express
• The Favourite
• Shoplifters
• Sorry to Bother You
• Moonlight
• s Ha

...plus 31 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The Library Of Congress released their 25 newest additions to the National Film Registry.

It's a hell of a list, covering a whole lot of ground. (Texas Chainsaw Massacre & The Miracle Worker weren't already in? Wow.)

• Annabelle Serpentine Dance
• KoKo's Earth Control
• Angels with Dirty Faces
• The Pride of the Yankees
• Invaders from Mars
• The Miracle Worker
• Chelsea Girls
• Ganja & Hess
• Uptown Saturday Night
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

NOTE: This is not a list of "one-hit wonders" who directed more than one film; this is a list of one-and-dones.

These are these directors' only features. Many of them make me weep for their creators' not being able to follow up.

There's a lot of actors/writers/etc in here, realizing directing is hard & walking away after one, but there's also careers that were simply cut short, which sucks just as bad.

(Note: Not all once-only films are amazing, or even worth watching; I'm omitting a lot of schlocky horror films & bad sexploitation ts from here, especially (for some reason) Italian ones. And I'm alphabetizing this list instead of putting them in rating order, because people are looking for their fave, which I totally get. If it's not here, let me know.)

• 27 Down
• Aleph
• Angst
• Another Nice Mess
• Another Sky
• Ballast
• Ballet Mécanique
• Bopha!
• Borderline
• Boxers Go to Heaven

...plus 97 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it's not a bad yardstick for franchises that have escaped the easy three-movie structure and tried to sequel a little closer to the sun. As it were.

• Mad Max: Fury Road
• The Muppet Christmas Carol
• John Wick: Chapter 4
• Avengers: Endgame
• Spider-Man: No Way Home
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• Bed and Board
• Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
• Rocky IV

...plus 55 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

If the bromide "Write What You Know" means anything, these films are living proof.

Most filmmakers have a film in their catalogue about how they make films, and some of them are absolute masterpieces about the art of creativity. I find this stuff inspiring.

This list doesn't (or shouldn't) include documentaries (sorry, Hearts of Darkness). I'm looking at fictonalized stories about the creative process.

• 8½
• Barton Fink
• Synecdoche, New York
• Cecil B. Demented
• The Player
• Tropic Thunder
• Day for Night
• Singin' in the Rain
• Hollywood Shuffle
• Ed Wood

...plus 37 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The International Union Of Quizzers' Discord (https://discord.gg/s6sSqwZ) is listing their favorite films of all time by letter. Everyone gets to choose two movies per letter:

- A "Fun" Movie, that when you have a chance to see it, you think, yeah, that'll be great, let's do this. And...

- An "Important" Film, that you think belongs on a cinematic Mount Rushmore, or at least that you consider a real artistic masterpiece.

(Do read the notes on these; the explanations are pretty great.)

What makes this hard is that you don't get to choose more than two (at most) films per letter, so there will be some absolute gems that don't make the list.

That said: if there's something we've missed, the discord & let us know!

We also have Music Club, & a ton of other clubs just getting started now, plus plenty of trivia & game show stuff as well. discord.gg/s6sSqwZ

• Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

  I was a 13 year old boy when Ace Ventura: Pet Detective came out. I was never the same. [Jay]

• Adam's Rib

  My :mortar_board: choice is 1949's Adam's Rib, that Tracy-Hepburn classic about married lawyers who take opposite sides of what Tracy's Adam thinks is a cut and dry case for the prosecution but Hepburn's Amanda sees as an opportunity to highlight a double standard in the law. It's directed by George Cukor, written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and features Judy Holliday, Tom Ewell, David Wayne and Jean Hagen in delightful ing roles. [John D]

• Adaptation.

  This movie is relentlessly inventive, self-referential, and the best way out of writer's block I've ever seen. As a Susan Orlean fan from way back to her first book ("Saturday Night"), I was excited to see that "The Orchid Thief" was going to be filmed...but wondered how it'd be turned into a screenplay and how badly it'd be messed up. Turns out Charlie Kaufman was stuck, badly so, and wound up writing a screenplay -- credited to his fictional twin brother -- about how impossible it was to adapt "The Orchid Thief." It's based on the book, but can't really be said to be about it. I especially love how it blurs the lines between reality and fiction, as you have people playing themselves, real people being played by actors, and fictional people being played by actors. The scene where Kaufman visits Spike Jonze's set for Being John Malkovich is especially a mindfuck...as Kaufman wrote the screenplay for that movie as well, and Jonze recreates his own set from a prior movie. [Vidiot]

• The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

  Such a weirdly funny film that kind of changed the way I watched movies when I was in High School. I'm way overdue for a re-watch. I might should rectify that this weekend. [ufez]

• The African Queen

  I’m gonna go with The African Queen, which I’ve probably seen 40 times, and it makes me laugh and cry every time. Showed it to my 10-year-old daughter over the holidays, and was thrilled when she gave it an enthusiastic thumbs up. [Chubby Panda]

• After Hours

  I think I might have seen it for the first time on late night television (maybe when I was a kid before I moved to NY). There was a period when it was on television on a regular basis. I thought it was such a fun, fascinating depiction and probably contributed to my idea that THIS is where I need to be. Of course the NYC of the 1980s didn't really exist (at least not Soho) by the time I got here. But it perfectly captures the weirdness and distinctiveness of these once-untraveled pockets of the City when artists had all this freedom to work and the ability to easily afford living here. It might be my favourite Scorcese movie, if for no other reason than it's so unlike much of his work and a lot of people don't even it. (Available on Amazon and probably a few other places). [Shanadian]

• Airplane!

  Maybe the funniest slapstick comedy since the silent film era. [GriecoM]

• A League of Their Own

  I absolutely love this movie and will drop everything I'm doing to watch it any time I run across it. So many great roles. Geena Davis and Lori Petty are fantastic. Tom Hanks in one of the few roles I actually like him in (sorry, I know he's a fantastic actor, but something about him generally rubs me the wrong way). Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell. Love. It. [ufez]

• Alice in Wonderland

  Last time I watched it, last summer with a 4-year-old which you'd think would help me enjoy it, it actually let me down a bit; it had been one of my top 3 or top 5 all-time, but this time the wittiness didn't quite carry the day in the same fashion. [Bryan]

• Almost Famous

  It's one of my favourites of this century and IMO, one of the best of the last two decades. I think it's Cameron Crowe's standout work, from the pitch perfect period details that captured the decade to the 70s songs to Crowe's writing, to the ensemble, many of whom were little known or novices like lead and Crowe stand-in Patrick Fugit. Even the weakest part (IMO), which is Penny Lane, is still beautifully rendered. Crowe deservedly won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for it. I can stop and watch this movie any time and be as charmed as I was the first time. [Shanadian]

...plus 160 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

While I'm hot & cold on Scorsese's work itself, I can't for a second quibble with his commitment to cinema as an art form, or the work he's done to give people like me a foothold in beginning to understand the art of filmmaking from other cultures.

• Limite
• Two Monks
• Redes
• Two Girls on the Street
• Enamorada
• Kalpana
• After the Curfew
• The Housemaid
• The Wagoner
• Dry Summer

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

These aren't in any order, really, although generally the higher up the list it is, the better I think of it.

• s Ha
• Moonlight
• Roma
• Shoplifters
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
• Parasite
• Sorry to Bother You
• The Favourite
• The Souvenir
• Damsels in Distress

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My favorite movies that are at least partly send-ups of another genre, or of a style or viewpoint.
(I tried to restrict myself to one film per director, so, apologies to Messrs. Guest, Brooks and Sturges.)

• This Is Spinal Tap
• Sorry to Bother You
• What We Do in the Shadows
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• Black Dynamite
• Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
• The Player
• Barton Fink
• Heathers
• American Psycho

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.