The Fall (2006, Tarsem Singh)
Tarsem’s previous movie The Cell had a crappy story and bad acting wrapped around a handful of intensely cool but disconnected imagery. This one has a simple but decent story and good acting, with...
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The Immortal Story (1968, Orson Welles)
Hour-long, splendorously Wellesian, elegant little movie about storytelling, made between Chimes at Midnight and F for Fake. Why does nobody ever talk about this one? A French production (I watched the...
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Treasure Island (1985, Raoul Ruiz)
Ruiz made a series of films in the mid-1980’s involving sailors, pirates, children, islands, treasure and magic. There’s an explicit Treasure Island reference in Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983), and...
View ArticleThe Little Prince (2015, Mark Osborne)
Magical, delicate-looking stop-motion retelling of the Little Prince story, in which I guess he leaves his beloved rose, wanders some asteroids meeting strange adults, then crashes on Earth’s desert...
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Kubo and the Two Strings (2016, Travis Knight)
The ultimate meta-storytelling, misfit-family, humans-vs-gods, origami-magic, epic-quest movie featuring the ultimate ass-kicking monkey. My only complaint about the gorgeous stop-motion, which...
View ArticleNocturnal Animals (2016, Tom Ford)
It was the baby-monitor jump-scare that lost me. Intriguing backstory open before the movie changes directions, centering on Amy Adams (far less electric here than in Arrival, and given much less to...
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Escapes (2017, Michael Almereyda)
The first fifteen minutes of this ninety-minute movie was one long story about when Hampton Fancher was out of work, dating Teri Garr and getting into trouble. I was worried, but I’m here because of...
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Mysterious Object at Noon (2000, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
A mutating fiction containing documentary-like scenes – unlike his other films, which sometimes have people playing versions of themselves but would never be confused for docs – the fictional part...
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Blind (2014, Eskil Vogt)
A Cannes Fortnight screening. This sounded like a stalker thriller from the description, but it’s one of those really good Stranger Than Fiction writing movies, the story and perspective always...
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