Favorite films

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1949

★★★★ Watched 21 Jul 2024

"His wartime experiences, during which his brother died crossing the Pyrenees, inform the grave introspection on which his films are founded, though it was the furtive life under Vichy rule that truly dictated the form and expression of them. His first film, Le silence de la mer (1949), adapted from a clandestine Resistance novel, depicts the vow of silence taken by a man and his niece living in a provincial home suddenly playing host to a visiting Nazi officer. A…

2023

★★★½ Watched 19 Nov 2023

“A sense of the eternal is echoed in the imagery captured by Hints and cinematographer Ants Tammik, which evokes classical 16th- and 17th-century painting. The dark, wooded interior of the sauna is illuminated only by a pair of small, frosted windows, lending the bare bodies on display a sculptural, chiaroscuro quality. But the framing is decidedly modern, as Hints eschews clear portraiture in favor of the kind of abstracted fragmentation that opens Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a reference point further invoked…

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2014

★½ 3

Until now I’ve been hopelessly ignorant. Foxcatcher reveals a deep dark secret about America, and the secret is this: this country’s legacy is founded upon an unhealthy mix of greed, wealth and megalomania. It’s truly upsetting to hear now as a citizen of this country for over two decades that there may be something evil brewing beneath the sterilized narratives of American excellence and glory portrayed in mass media. How could I have been in the dark for so long…

1958

★★★★★ Rewatched 07 Jun 2014

I still largely stand by this mediocre review I wrote two years ago, but there's one new detail that I noted and want to elaborate upon: every time Scottie returns to Midge’s apartment, the visual strategy differs in relation to Scottie’s systematic termination of her from his life. The first time Hitchcock shows the two together—the second scene of the movie, before Scottie’s “met” Madeleine—the staging and cutting is fairly conventional. They’re looking at one another, engaging with one another,…

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