Glóin the Dark

I've seen lots of excellent films this year. Maybe not as many really outstanding ones as in other recent years, though it isn't easy to judge until the dust has settled a bit.

Yeah, Beau travail, White Material and 35 Shots of Rum are the three that I've found most effective. Especially the latter, which is also the least convoluted, most chilled-out and mellow of the bunch (a modern take on Ozu's Late Spring). I don't think I've seen any of her earlier films, and have never managed to get hold of The Intruder. Even the less memorable films are usually a pleasure just to look at for reasons that I don't find easy to describe; something about the rhythm of the images.

Surely you're joking? 1.66:1 has been one of the most common aspect ratios in European films since the mid-20th Century! You've definitely seen lots of them. There are a lot of recent American examples too. Have you seen 35 Shots of Rum?

No, that's a colourised screenshot from Murnau's Nosferatu.

A Tenet-inspired pornographic film could explore some interesting configurations. (Not that I mean to lower the tone or anything...)

Plonkers; they're only interested in the flashy bits. I'm waiting until the performance is complete and then I'm going to buy the CDs.

Can't wait to read your explanation of what was happening!

There Will Be Blood The Master and Phantom Thread Inherent Vice and Punch-Drunk Love Magnolia and Boogie Nights Hard Eight Perhaps you still

I love all of these films, Inherent Vice included. Apart from anything else, it really is hilariously funny. My main negative issue with Anderson's films is that his wandering, exploratory approach (which is so effective in developing rich scenarios and characters) seems to result in a tendency to drift in the later stages.

Certainly in Blow Out.

Yeah, the scene with the bullets was probably enough to establish the nature of interactions between a person and an object on opposite timelines. It's when you have two people, or groups of people, interacting on opposite timelines that it becomes difficult to comprehend (at least for someone who's not the sharpest tool in the box). I found myself constantly trying to imagine the scene playing out backwards, from the point of view of the inverted characters, to understand their motivations and state of knowledge at each instant. A couple of scenes showing two mutually inverted characters tryi

I know. I like sentimentality in movies considerably less than you do...

I'd call it "mawkishness" rather than "heart", and was glad that Nolan didn't try to imbue this film with the sort of sentimentality that mars the endings of Interstellar and Dunkirk. The "Don't try to understand it; just feel it" advice didn't really work for me because I found it difficult even to get a reasonable feel for what was going on during the combat scenes. I think the film would have benefitted from more time spent exploring and illustrating various "inversion" phenomena in a calm setting and then deploying them in action scenes after the viewer has had a chan

If anything, Mann is an underrated filmmaker, though Heat is probably overrated relative to his other work. The film sets up the (first-time) viewer to anticipate that De Niro's character will fall into the trap of breaking his own cardinal rule (having nothing in your life that you can't walk out on in thirty seconds) by falling in love with Brenneman's, but he remains true to his word when the moment comes. Instead, he falls into the trap for the opposite reason; his downfall is hatred.