Here, you can find reviews of older films. They can be canonical classics or hidden gems that have just seen the light of a 4k restoration
Canyon Passage
Jacque Tourneur’s Canyon Passage is as about rituals as any westerns. For it is through patterns of distinctive habits that we can clearly understand the characters onscreen, whose presences feel permanent despite we’ve only been with them for less than 90 minutes. These are Logan’s constant travelling, Camrose’s flipping of a coin, and Linnet peaking…
Review: The Children’s Hour
One can easily trace the theatrical roots of William Wyler’s 1961 film adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s 1934 stage play The Children’s Hour: the actors are facing away from each other when delivering dialogues, turning their bodies toward the cinematic eye. They often exclaim with a desperate unnaturalness and a lack of dramatic verisimilitude that one…
Boogie Nights – Hedonism and Its Downfalls
How to discuss a film as hectic as Paul Thomas Anderson’s sophomore feature Boogie Nights? By asking this question, I have already fruitlessly initiated such discussions. This is a film that has progressively disappointed me through repeat viewings. Rewatching it in 70mm this last weekend – I’d imagine the ideal condition a devotee of the…
Too Early / Too Late – An Introduction to Straub / Huillet
A recent surge in interest in the texts of Serge Daney has led me to Too Early / Too Late, subsequently leading me to watch a film from the filmmaking couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet for the first time. My previous assumption of the challenging nature of their cinema gradually dissolves, one landscape after…
Hard Eight – Paul Thomas Anderson’s Debut Feature Short of a Fully-Formed Vision
With the imminent release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest and tenth feature film, One Battle After Another, in September, it would be a good time to settle my relationship with one of the preeminent American filmmakers of his generation. Perhaps ‘settle’ is not the most fitting word, as films are subjected to constant revisitation and…
Cinema Travelogue 