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Gruppo di famiglia in un interno aka Conversation Piece by Luchino Visconti

Written for the screen but staged like a play, it works terrifically in its self-imposed limitations. Carried by superb acting and cinematography, the family portrait with its generational and social...

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辣手神探 (roughly: Hot-Handed Super Detective) aka Hard Boiled by John Woo

Blu-ray 4K treatments alone, like for Face/Off in 2023, don’t count; remastered theatrical rereleases are what I’m interested in. I love the things I own that I collected in the past, like videos and...

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The End of Oak Street by David Robert Mitchell

It’s stumbling along on its characters’ relentless idiocy and irrational impulses, not driven forward by anything resembling dramatic development. Everything’s explained to death without making sense;...

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The Fast and the Furious by Rob Cohen

Guiltless snack. Crammed with hilarious clichés on the one hand, yet many of them freshly invented by it on the other. While coherence isn’t what the screenplay is ambitious about, some plot hookups...

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Mutiny by Jean-François Richet

Decent camera work, satisfying action choreography, excellent sound design. Screenplay isn’t top-notch, and the scene setups for boarding and the finale are eye roll-inducing. “The protagonist is a...

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8番出口 aka Exit 8 by Kawamura Genki

Fantastic script that takes the game’s mechanics and weaves them into an emotionally gripping story while still preserving the vibes of an indie video game. Its entwined loops, a universal...

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The Man Who Fell to Earth by Nicolas Roeg

The screening of The Man Who Fell to Earth I attended last night was preceded by an event with guests and talks about David Bowie’s Berlin period, and there was a lot of sentiment that 2016 had been a...

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun

The most ironically adorably nerdy queer movie I’ve ever seen. Einbinder. Anderson. Fix. A fantastically layered surreal meta-meta-rewrite and reconciliation of period slasher movie motifs that is...

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Ojczyzna/Vaterland aka Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski

Excellent direction, cinematography, acting, script, but not every dialogue line hits the mark. Some reviews call it a historical vignette, and indeed: brief, taut, coiled, and wired to unravel in the...

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Organ Recital »Tempus fugit« by Ute Gremmel-Geuchen

Great organ recital by Ute Gremmel-Geuchen, a former student of Oscar Gottlieb Blarr’s (in attendance), with works by J.S. Bach, César Franck, and Norbert Laufer (also in attendance). Laufer’s »Tempus...

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Pahanhautoja aka Hatching by Hanna Bergholm

Perhaps one or two jump scares too many, but well done in all other horror departments. At times reminiscent of Lynch’s dread inside the mundane and Wes Anderson’s cinematography. Some script...

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Funeral Casino Blues by Roderick Warich

Character-driven, camera-driven, mysterious, stylish. Fantastical journey along the edges of the real, the hyperreal, and the unreal. It’s almost as if it were the delayed final part of a tetralogy,...

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Yön lapsi aka Nightborn by Hanna Bergholm

The Ents are evil. Cinematography and sound design are top. Not all assembled horror elements and motifs to support its theme fit together coherently. Dramatic structure and cut seem off but it’s the...

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Les musiciens by Grégory Magne

Bittersweet, fun, great music, passionate performances, lovingly executed. Almost no music-related as-you-know-Bobs so one remains fully immersed even as an (ex-)musician. At first, the...

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Ice Cream Man by Eli Roth

Knowing zilch about it except it was horror, I wasn’t prepared for relentless splatter, but hey. No dramatic structure beyond or between the occasional plot point, and every set location overstays its...

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Possession by Andrzej Żuławski

It turned out I hadn’t known the movie at all, as I had only watched the U.S. release back in the day—a version from which 43 minutes had been cut to turn it into an easily marketable grindhouse movie...

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Organ Recital by Oskar Gottlieb Blarr

Fantastic organ recital by Oskar Gottlieb Blarr, whom I know from way back when one of the things I did for a living, at a certain point in my life, was being a hired gun support vocalist for choirs...

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Tuner by Daniel Roher

Wonderfully played romance/drama plus Hoffman at his absolute lovable best. Music movie about classical music (plus jazz) that makes me nostalgic for a bygone part of my life. Inventive heist thriller...

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Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition by Kane Parsons

The Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition adds a so far unreleased episode of the Backrooms web series as a stand-alone post-credit tie-in scene. It’s shot in handheld found footage style, making it...

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The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan

Clever screenplay moves and original motifs in a continuation of ancient storytelling traditions. Greek Tragedy already reshaped characters, giving everybody from Odysseus to Orestes the boy howdy...

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