If it's a great film that starts out kind of wonky, it'll get great reviews and I won't be sampling it to begin with.

For the record, 204 is the number of new theatrical releases I've seen so far this year. I generally see over 400 films total annually.

Film critics watch a lot of movies, but we can’t watch everything. With approximately seven weeks left in 2015, I’ve seen (as of the day I’m writing this) 204 features that have been commercially released this year. That’s kind of a staggering number, but it’s less than a quarter of the truly staggering 857 features…

Well, sure. I don't review the ones I don't finish. Don't even log 'em on Letterboxd. All I can say is they didn't appear to be my thing.

Oh.

Jordan, Morocco, and Spain.

My whole last paragraph is about that.

People always say this if the review refers to the ending at all. I tend to reserve Spoiler Space for films that feature some sort of twist or revelation that demands tackling in detail. Here, the film just goes in a stupid direction. But for the curious:

All of my friends who are heavily into avant-garde/abstract cinema actively dislike this film. Just as a data point. I think they're focusing too hard on the images (that's what they do), but there is such a thing as mediocre abstraction.

I liked Room 237 considerably more than this film. For one thing, including five completely different crazy analyses of The Shining automatically precludes any possibility that the film is an act of advocacy. More than that, though, the way The Russian Woodpecker is structured makes it seem to be about much more than…

Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry for the confusion.

It's not as if every movie begins as an A and gets demoted for making errors. The grade is just my overall assessment. But my distaste at the sexual aspect is perhaps stronger than the review suggests—I was hugely disappointed that the film went there.

Thank you for respectfully disagreeing. So refreshing.

Assuming you mean the opening shot, this.

If it worked for you, great. Didn't convey the impression of days blurring to me at all; it just felt like a flashy dissolve designed to keep the shot going. I'm fine disagreeing on this. Again, I liked Birdman—that was a parenthetical observation. Victoria I probably would have disliked even if it had been shot…

Is that what you think it feels like in the shots I cited? As I say, it's virtually never intended to convey that impression.

I love that adverb. It hasn't just been explained, it's been explained effortlessly. So obvious they didn't even have to try!

It's thematically appropriate in Birdman because Birdman is a movie about live theater. Victoria has nothing to do with live theater. And the fact that a story is told in real time doesn't mean it should unfold in a single shot—especially when shooting it that way requires long passages of essentially dead air, which…

As a few people have pointed out (thanks), my brief remark about Birdman refers to the way González Iñárritu insists on maintaining the illusion of a single shot even on those occasions when the story leaps forward in time. That makes what is otherwise a thematically appropriate technique (for once) suddenly look like…

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