- Clouds of Sils Maria makes some unexpected choices, particularly near the end, and it seems very deliberately to leave things (almost disappointingly) unresolved. And yet it’s also very engrossing, and the three leads—particularly Stewart and Binoche—really shine.
- Things escalate very quickly to the diabolic in Alucarda, which I’m not sure is entirely successful—and definitely shows its budget as a ’70s Mexican horror movie—but it has such an interesting, frequently unsettling look.
- Not to put too fine a point on it, but The Man from London is awful, near-unwatchable—and not just because it’s excruciatingly long or strangely dubbed, but because it hardly even qualifies as a film. It’s more a collection of still images occasionally interspersed with a slow sludge of movement or unengaging dialogue. That they’re sometimes well-composed images is hardly the point; a short film like La Jetée, for instance, still manages to make photographs feel cinematic, whereas The Man from London feels like an endurance test, or an art installation critics might nod appreciatively at but no one actually wants to sit through.
- None of the actors in The Seventh Cross are actually German, which is occasionally odd, as is the way the story is narrated. Yet there’s a lot about the movie that is pretty terrific, including an Oscar-nominated performance by Hume Cronyn.
- The Place Promised in Our Early Days has some lovely animated visuals, but the complicated timelines and alternate histories make it a little hard to follow.
- Charlotte Rampling is just so good, in such subtle ways, in 45 Years.
I also re-watched a couple of movies:
- I didn’t like Hackers in 1995, and if I’ve grown to appreciate it more by even the smallest measure since then, that’s only because it seems even more ridiculous, and you almost have to laugh at that.
- I also didn’t love my re-visit of Penn & Teller Get Killed, which has a few good moments, mostly at the beginning at end, but doesn’t hold together as a narrative or as a showcase for the duo. (Oddly enough, Penn Jillette gives a much more interesting performance in Hackers.)
