Several months later, the layers of meta-meaning in Welles’s swan-song continue to play out across a long moebius strip in my mind, and each new circuit around the loop reveals something I’d missed on the last go-round.
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Two anime films that are kindred in their approaches to high school girls discovering their queerness, despite the chasmic differences of style and tone between them.
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There are many reasons why Wonderstruck fails so disastrously, why it is by a wide margin Todd Haynes’s worst film to date and an eye-popping come-down from his widely-beloved Carol, but the most important reason presents itself fairly early.
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Stronger feels, in most every respect, like a film that overlays the known facts of Jeff Bauman’s trauma and recovery on top of a conventionally satisfying dramatic structure.
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I can’t remember the last time I saw a film that presented a fairly straightforward, coherent narrative that was so unswervingly and gleefully willing to break rules of craft as The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
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A film that radiates compassion and nuance in every moment it spends with its Parkinson’s-afflicted mother Judy (Shirley Henderson), even as the means of telling the story can waver in effectiveness.
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The camera of Antoine Bourges’s freshman feature Fail to Appear observes offices and coutroom halls and plain-walled living rooms and the people inside them patiently, dispassionately, gently.
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If you were to concoct a movie concept for Christopher Nolan to direct that would play to his strengths and mitigate his weaknesses, you could certainly do far worse than Dunkirk.
Read MoreDevan and Will liveblog the 2017 Cinematheque 24-Hour Movie Marathon.
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Tomorrow, I'll be embarking on my third experience at the local Cinematheque's biannual 24-hour Movie Marathon. The event is really cool, shows good movies (that are not revealed before the event!), and if you have a curious mind, the will to endure, and a lot of spare time this weekend, you should swing by.
Over the four years since the first marathon, it's taken on a lot of personal significance for me, being just about the fullest mind-and-body commitment to cinema that I know how to undertake: intellectual discovery, social communion, local art culture, physical presence. And they always throw a goofy Midnight Movie in there, so that's fun.
So, this year, I will offer some vicarious experience of the event by posting about it between movies right here, as the (long overdue) inaugural posts on the new Sad Hill Cemetery blog. Expect efforts at honest connection, emotional reportage, and analysis to be slowly corrupted by the demon that is sleep deprivation. I'll also be making some Tweets when I get a chance, both for more fleeting and trivial thoughts and to give a heads up for new updates to the liveblog, so hit me up on there if you wanna connect live during this thing.
So, come back tomorrow and get ready to refresh! It's gonna be a long ride.
EDIT: Devan will also be liveblogging, apparently. So, you know. Be ready for that.
-Will