Film diary

I... don’t know what I was expecting.

Exhaustive and exhausting, Electric Boogaloo’s overview of Cannon Films’ raucous history covers dozens of the production company’s provocative movies with blinding speed. Given that its subject at its peak averaged nearly one film produced per week, the pace is appropriate, and the clips and talking heads all whiz by so fast that reflection yields little more than an admittedly mesmerizing blur of explosions and boobs. Enough sunk in to convince me to revisit Cannon’s… See more →

Animated films aimed at broad audiences rarely take real advantage of the medium’s expressive potential, opting instead for one or another flavor of mannered representationalism. Boy & the World is a delightful exception, channeling the magical realism of a child’s naïve perspective to create a singularly vibrant, rhythmic aesthetic. Both a polemic and an affirmation, the film is occasionally heavy-handed with its politics, but not enough to undermine its core exploration of a generational spectrum… See more →

As successfully as any film I can recall, Carol captures the desperation that accompanies falling in love, and its fuzzy 16 mm rendering gives it the feel of a memory whose potency is undiminished by distance.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am wary of the seductive power of nostalgia. The original Star Wars trilogy loomed so large in my generation’s childhood that any meaningful attempt to revive it was going to be met with uncritical optimism. So as I cheered along with a packed theater on the opening night of The Force Awakens, I remembered that I had done much the same thing sixteen years earlier for The Phantom Menace, which,… See more →

On an emotional level, the aspect of Spotlight that had the biggest impact on me was its journalists’ team dynamic, and the team’s (mostly) unfailing trust in each other to do the job right, even in the middle of the highest-stakes investigation of their careers. In a discussion about the film, this was described with a colloquialism I hadn’t heard before, and which I found too perfect not to make a note of here: competence… See more →

At its best, Ghost in the Shell is a striking exercise in worldbuilding. If they were extended, I could probably watch an hour or two of its atmospheric montages of daily life in Hong Kong’s near future, whose sights and sounds are at once dreamlike and palpable. But as an exercise in storytelling, it’s disappointing that a film with such strong visuals and interesting ideas relies almost entirely on dialogue for its expository and thematic… See more →