Inherent Vice is a film that tricks us into settling in for a noir about a man solving a mystery, and instead presents us with a man confronting a melancholy truth: everything—lives, eras, and loves—comes to an end.
Is the story of China's last ruler being overthrown deserving of an epic? Or, perhaps a better question: Would this be the epic a Chinese filmmaker would make?
We are so used to films that rush us through emotions, showing us something real being felt, before quickly cutting to the next scene. A film like The Emigrants, open to experiencing difficult emotions and sharing them with its audience, can only do so sensitively, and with time.
In the images from Sátántangó that still cling to me, I see my mind’s selective memory: its search at work. How the memories of scenes become not a catalogue of the film, but another creation altogether.
The Return of the King is an object lesson in satisfying endings. Each one is necessary, a coda for an important story thread; each one folds in on the others like the pages of a book.
Clocking in at 152 minutes, Funny People is practically a Lav Diaz film in comparison to its American studio comedy brethren.
Though I wouldn’t come out as a trans woman for another four years, Laurence Anyways felt like a map to the puzzle that was my body, a dysphoric labyrinth of ill-fitting limbs and inarticulate desires.
Martin Scorsese's Silence is about entering into the cloud of unknowing, the dark night of the soul, listening to the silence of God and waiting eternally for a response.
Star! was a movie solely predicated on the idea that audiences would turn out in droves simply to see Julie Andrews in another grand-scale musical. It gives her no conflicts. It dramatizes no challenges for her to overcome. And it lasts 2 hours and 53 minutes.
It would seem paradoxical for a film to be both excessive and minimalist, and yet this synthesis is exactly what Wim Wenders achieves with Kings of the Road, taking a storyline so small that it strains the very definition of the term and blowing it out to epic length.
Magnolia is messy, grandiose, ostentatious, overambitious, and overwhelming—or, in the words of its auteur “it’s too fucking long...it’s all just too fucking ‘too.’” It also happens to be my favorite film.
Ever since it's release in 1980, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate has been perceived as a failure. The film’s narrative and characters are obsessed with the idea of failure. The film itself, though, is anything but a failure.
