Marriage Story

Even before Noah Baumbach showed us the article with Nicole and Charlie titled “Scenes from a Marriage”, the movie screamed of influences to Bergman to me. The main characters are a theater director and an actress (like in After the Rehearsal). There are shots that evoke Persona. And the basic story feels like stuff that…

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Schindler’s List

This movie is built on contrasts, and it includes one of the most devastating single cuts in movies. It’s a dual narrative that almost feels separated for a while before the two become completely intertwined in the final hour. It’s impeccably made, acted, scored, and assembled. It is one of, if not the, greatest single…

Contagion

Sometimes I think people just simply watch movies wrong. Looking through some of the negative reviews of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion was one of those moments. It’s a procedural movie that is meant to capture the wide-ranging reality of a massive disease outbreak in the modern era, not a three act drama with character arcs. It’s…

Excalibur

John Boorman is a crazy person. This is a film that needs to be watched differently from most films. It operates very differently from the more realistic bent that the vast majority of films lend themselves towards and leans very heavily into a much more formalistic approach. It’s an effort to bring Romantic painting to…

The Lodger

#19 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. The opening few minutes of this film are such a marked contrast to Hitchcock’s first film and bear incredibly obvious German influences. The Pleasure Garden showed some skill from a young director, but The Lodger announced a real talent of strong skill. The rest of the movie…