I find most other critics' grades and ratings wildly inflated. Ebert, for example, used to give four stars to dozens of films every year. It loses all meaning. But I can't keep contextualizing my grades here ("no, really, most of my top ten list every year is B+'s"), so it's easier to just bump everything up by one,…

I wouldn't really encourage you to prioritize it in any way, but Lakeview Terrace is definitely the most LaButish of his recent films (until this one, but this is an outlier since he didn't direct it). Not without interest.

I like Elia Suleiman (the director of Time That Remains, as well as Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention) quite a bit, and I like this actor in his films (where he's asked to be much more deadpan, albeit not as deadpan as Suleiman himself).

That is indeed what I meant. Yeah, there was Valium, but it wasn't as prevalent.

It's a long story. The crime I was arrested for wasn't the crime I actually committed. But my fingerprints were at the scene (I'd been printed from a teenage shoplifting arrest) and I had no plausible means of fighting it, plus I *had* been guilty of something (though by that point I'd turned my life around and was…

Actually the main reason for getting it expunged was so I could vote. I don't have the kind of career that entails extensive background checks.

Indeed.

That's what I figured. Thanks.

Well, but the failed pilot was itself adapted from the feature script. Heat is pretty much what Mann always had in mind.

I wish it were something remotely cool, but I actually just stole some petty cash from an office in the same building as my dad's, when I was around 19. And the arrest happened years after the fact. It's a very long story, which I'd tell if it were at all interesting, but it really isn't. Anyway, definitely a softened…

Just to be clear, Mike was having that discussion on Twitter where he's restricted by character limits. And he was talking about a film he saw once a dozen years ago. But yes, generally speaking I'm not a big fan of documentaries that primarily involve people sitting in front of a camera explaining things and/or…

Even after reading this review, I don't know why Ben likes it. (Hi Ben!)

The whole thing with De Rossi's face is really weird. It's not the wig. She goes back and forth from looking bizarre to looking normal in the space of this very episode.

I wouldn't say that the director's cut of At Long Last Love is "generally" considered "great." It has a small cult following. But you're right, I should have noted it.

"the review seems to imply that they aren't very good movies."

I didn't *dis*like it. Just not over the moon like most people are. Lots of great stuff there.

I loved Morris' review as well. Looking forward to catching up with that film in a less hectic context—it's just so long (and screened at inconvenient times vis-à-vis my writing schedule) that I couldn't fit it in.

It's really not fair to say that I "slam" Zero Dark Thirty in that piece. I like the film quite a bit; it was in my top 20 of last year as I recall. One element bothered me and I found it odd that nobody else had remarked on it, so I focused on that. The AVC's glowing review covered its strengths well; I didn't see…

I question all kinds of films being here, for all kinds of reasons. In 2004 (I think) the Competition included a German film, The Edukators; I distinctly recall speculating that it was included because Germany had been ignored in recent years and they felt obligated to throw the country a bone. (Might've been rumors…

A fair number of male critics are gay, but I don't think it's my place to say which ones. It would have been interesting to read the openly queer Nathan Lee, who used to write for the Village Voice and the New York Times, on these films, but apart from some pieces for Film Comment I haven't seen his byline much lately.