Ozu is one of my bigger blind spots. Will have to rectify that sooner rather than later.

Highlights from my last few weeks of movie-watching:

Tried to use the paragraph-separating html tag here but I guess that kind of stuff is below Kinja. Noted. 

<p>Highlights from my last few weeks of movie-watching:</p>

I just finished watching this about half an hour ago and aside from Margot Robbie’s over-the-top femme fatale act it’s pretty damn awful. Really made this millenial understand why people to this day curse the witless mid-’90s Tarantino knock-offs, it’s pretty much that but set in a cheap artificial unpopulated neon-lit…

That would explain the amount of movies he’s seen. 

He sure as hell made the most of it, though. 

If you’re between 18 and 28, this year they had a Three Days in Cannes program with free passes being given out for the last three days of the festival:

I still think it was a missed opportunity that Fury Road wasn’t put in official competition. Especially considering that was the year when the Coens presided over the jury, and they’re big fans of Road Warrior... it could definitely have won something big. 

I’ve been interested in this since the first positive notices out of TIFF last year. (Including yours.) Never seen anything Schrader’s directed, but I look forward to rectifying this before I get around to this movie. Regardless, it’s really heartening to see someone like Schrader who’s spent the last couple of…

“Pull out everything the movie is about and the movie is nothing!” oh yeah love that logic, works on every movie I want it to

I Stand Alone is pretty grim and stripped-down visually, no flashing lights or wild camera movements or anything. Irreversible settles down after about 40 minutes. Enter the Void - yeah, maybe you’re better off avoiding that.

The subway conversation in Irreversible is the best scene in that movie. And the main character’s interior monologue in I Stand Alone is extremely effective.

Yup. 2016 also had three, by Maren Ade, Andrea Arnold, and Nicole Garcia.

I had one of my favorite cinematic experiences with Goodbye to Language, with one local theater turning its sole screening in our city into this wannabe hip event with pricey tickets and free champagne and shit, attracting the kind of people who’d probably heard the name Godard, maybe even seen Breathless, and were…

She walks a super thin line between ridiculous and terrifying and nails it. It’s a pretty amazing performance.

I’ve seen three Serebrennikov films and in them he’s at his best when the material calls for real verve and brazenness and dark humor. Playing the Victim is an excellent black comedy, and The Student, to my mind, is a far more blistering indictment of modern Russia than anything Andrey Zvyagintsev ever put out in part…

Oh. Sorry I missed it when the entire world picked you to be its spokesperson.

The review notes plenty of narrative and directorial decisions that sound fairly fresh for this type of movie and make this one a compelling enough take on it. I haven’t seen I Spit on Your Grave either, but somehow I suspect it doesn’t have an “unapologetically aggressive female gaze”, for starters. 

Who’s “we”?