Overstreet

Gut-wrenching, stomach-souring, infuriating, like crawling through broken glass... this is one of the most difficult documentaries I've ever sat through. What I began to think was too sensationalistic, characterized by a spirit of vengeance, eventually justifies itself by broadening its scope to reveal the purposefulness within it all. It's a necessary film and I'm glad it exists. I wish I could remove the word harrowing from all of my previous reviews, though, so that I could more properly and powerfully apply that term here.

I love this video and was going to share it today, but I'm realizing that it's really difficult for people to find a formal presentation of the list itself. The link given with the video is just artsandfaith.com. A newcomer arriving at the home page could have a hell of a time wandering around trying to find whatever we're considering the central publication of the list. Similarly, if I go to Ken's introduction to the list on The Porch, I can read that long essay and still not know where to click. So... forgive me if I've missed something obvious, but what link represents the

It's great. (I saw it during a brief big-screen exhibition in Seattle earlier this year.) It's compromised, as each episode increasingly seems to be, by how fragmented the stories are becoming. But there is an emotional gut-punch in this once that was inevitable, and I have to stop there to avoid spoilers. Here's what I posted at Letterboxd.

Whoa! That's fantastic!

Thy Kingdom Come, a short made entirely from outtakes of To the Wonder, following Bardem's priest as he takes confessions that are actually true confessions, is now streaming on Kanopy and rentable elsewhere.

The sale is totally on... and I am in torment. Too short of spending cash to participate this time. So many titles I'm drooling over.

This EOB album is a lot of fun, although I'm glad that Radiohead leaves the lyrics to Thom Yorke. The rhythms and sounds here are very Radiohead, but the lyrics aren't nearly as compelling. When I first heard "Shangri-La," I thought I'd be buying this record on vinyl. After a few spans, I still like it, but I don't feel like I need to give it the deluxe treatment. Here are my favorite albums for 2020 so far.

I didn't like Madelne's Madeline. Shirley, by contrast, is my favorite film of 2020 at the halfway point. My review is up at Looking Closer.

Regarding the question of comparison — since I'm the one that was doing that most insistently in the Zoom discussion, let me clarify. I don't mean to say "I love A, and since B doesn't impress me as much as A, I don't like B." For me, it's more like this: "B left me curiously unmoved. I'm trying to work my way to why. It is styled like other films — A and C, for example – that really did move me. And it deals with subject matter that other films — like D and E — have dealt with, and those films moved me. I can talk about what worked in A, C, D, and E stylistically and substanti

I have utterly failed to provide new blurbs for anything. I'm going to make a run at it this weekend.

I don't have Disney+ either, Beth. And the pilot episode to The Madalorian didn't persuade me to prioritize it..

Every time I see it, I bump it farther up my list of all-time favorite films. It gives us a rare and honest depiction of just how complicated it is to discern "the right thing" — and how dangerous and costly, to oneself and others, that "thing" might actually be. It shows up just how commonly we settle for oversimplifications of righteousness in cinema. I've noticed recently that I cannot stomach anymore the kinds of common detective- and police-drama TV shows I've watched my whole life because I can no longer take the self-righteous grimaces of the detectives and cops when they murmur th

Since this is the Dardenne conversation currently in vogue, I thought I'd drop this link here. It's a good price on an increasingly rare DVD of The Son, which is, as far as I know, the only way to see the movie anymore. https://www.pricepulse.app/the-son_us_4885967

Hartigan was a special guest via Skype in my Glen Workshop film seminar in Santa Fe last summer. We watched Martin Bonner and then he joined us for 45 minutes of Q&A. It was great. He was so generous with his time and perspectives.

The body-on-body sequence you're referring to, while executed in an effectively creepy way, just checked the box of Tarkovsky Reference for me (or, at least one of the Tarkovsky references). It just felt to me like he was working through a list, incorporating a sort of Top Ten Ideas from Great Art Films. But by that point I was already somewhat frustrated with the footnotey-ness of the whole affair. I think I've described it before as like reading T.S. Eliot in a study edition filled with annotations. But for what it's worth — I'm not dismissing First Reformed or Young Ahmed. Not at all.