“La Belle Noiseuse” (Jacques Rivette, 1991) Jacques Rivette’s four-hour masterpiece about the act of artistic generation turns the male gaze back on itself. True, it’s hard to think of an actress who’s needed to be naked onscreen for your longer period of time in one movie than Emmanuelle Beart is in this just one.
is about working-class gay youths coming together in South East London amid a backdrop of boozy, toxic masculinity. This sweet story about two high school boys falling in love with the first time gets extra credit rating for introducing a younger generation on the musical genius of Cass Elliott from The Mamas & The Papas, whose songs dominate the film’s soundtrack. Here are more movies with the best soundtracks.
It’s fascinating watching Kathyrn Bigelow’s dystopian, slightly-futuristic, anti-police film today. Partly because the director’s later films, such as “Detroit,” veer up to now away from the anarchist bent of “Peculiar Days.” And still it’s our relationship to footage of Black trauma that is different too.
Recently exhumed from the HBO series that noticed Assayas revisiting the experience of making it (and, with no small level of stress, confessing to its continued hold over him), “Irma Vep” is ironically the project that allowed Assayas to free himself from the neurotics of filmmaking and faucet into the medium’s innate perception of grace. The story it tells is a straightforward just one, with endless complications folded within its film-within-a-film superstructure like the messages scribbled inside a youngster’s paper fortune teller.
The movie was impressed by a true story in Iran and stars the actual family members who went through it. Mere days after the news product broke, Makhmalbaf turned her camera over the family and began to record them, directing them to reenact particular scenes based upon a script. The moral queries raised by such a technique are complex.
The result is our humble attempt at curating the best of a decade that was bursting with new ideas, fresh Vitality, and much too many damn fine films than any best a porn hu hundred list could hope to consist of.
The ingloriousness of war, and the root of pain that would be passed down the generations like a cursed heirloom, might be seen even in the most unadorned of images. Devoid of even the tiniest little bit of hope or humor, “Lessons of Darkness” offers the most chilling and powerful condemnation of humanity inside of a long career that has alway porrn looked at us askance. —LL
The relentless nihilism of Mike Leigh’s “Naked” might be a hard capsule to swallow. Well, less a tablet than a glass of acid with rusty blades for ice cubes. David Thewlis, in a breakthrough performance, is on a dark night on the soul en route to the end of the world, proselytizing darkness to any poor pronhud soul who will listen. But Leigh makes the journey to hell thrilling enough for us to glimpse heaven on how there, his cattle prod of the film opening with a sharp shock as Johnny (Thewlis) is pictured raping a woman in a very dank Manchester alley before he’s chased off by her family and flees to the crummy corner of east London.
As authoritarian tendencies are seeping into politics on a world scale, “Starship Troopers” paints shiny, ugly insect-infused allegories in the dangers of blind adherence and also the power in targeting an easy enemy.
Depending on which Minimize you see (and there are at least five, not including lover edits), you’ll receive a different sprinkling of all of these, as Wenders’ original version was reportedly twenty hours long and took about a decade to make. The 2 theatrical versions, which hover around three hours long, were poorly received, and also the film existed in various ephemeral states until the 2015 release on the recently restored 287-minute director’s Slash, taken from the edit that Wenders and his editor Peter Przygodda place together themselves.
Of every one of the things that Paul Verhoeven’s dark comedian look at the future of authoritarian warfare presaged, just how that “Starship Troopers” uses its “Would you like to know more?
Steven Soderbergh is obsessed with money, lying, and non-linear storytelling, so it had been just a matter of time before he received around to granny anal adapting an Elmore Leonard novel. And lo, in the year of our lord 1998, that’s particularly what Soderbergh did, As well as in the procedure entered a completely new free poen period of his career with his first studio assignment. The surface is cool and breezy, while the film’s soul is about regret as well as a yearning for something more away from life.
, Justin Timberlake beautifully negotiates the bumpy terrain from disapproval to acceptance to love.
Time seems to have stood still in this place with its black-and-white Television set established and rotary phone, a couple of lonely pumpjacks groaning outside delivering the only noise or movement for miles. (A “Make America Great Again” sticker over the back of the beat-up car or truck is vaguely amusing but seems gratuitous, and it shakes us from the film’s foggy mood.)