This Clint bio is readable as summary, worthless as judgment. Why aren’t biographies written by critics, instead of hacks? We need more bios by people like Tag Gallagher, Bernard Eisenschitz, and Dan Nadel, less by journalists who purport to have taste and lack imagination

If Sergio Leone were alive today, he’d still only be a year older than Clint Eastwood

Please everyone stop befouling this good news with frames from Don’t Look Up

At any given moment I am thinking about these photos of Sally Eilers filming Walls of Gold in 1933.

“If I face a film that just delivers the message without leaving me the freedom to form my own perspective, I stay outside.”

The Tracking Shot in Kapo but it’s just about Mike Figgis making Megadoc

This past week's p0ptimism discourse has been thoughtful and these posts from Frank are especially articulate. One angle I haven't seen this round is, what did p0ptimism mean to you? As a teen in the 90s, I didn't know I was nb, queer or neurodivergent. /1

Really enjoyed the Generation Taylor ep of Switched on Pop for giving me vocab to talk about Swift's songwriting: minimal (stepwise) melodies w/perfect prosody, T Drops (a minor 2nd into a descending 5th etc). And for talking about Maisie Peters out loud. That's a first. What next, Claire Rosinkranz

Forget whether or not critics are mean enough anymore, what about Borges via Pierre Menard: “Censure and praise are sentimental operations which have nothing to do literary criticism.”

New Jen Cohen is rich, discursive, a lovely bummer. What a gift it is that old friends like Michael Stipe, Patti Smith and Guy Picciotti are in a position to help him get pictures like this* made. *as if anyone is making pictures like this, as if Robert Kramer had grown up with Dischord and lived

I think we can all agree James Gray was better before he went prestige but returning to his roots to make a story about brothers tangling with Russian Mafia in Queens–w/Driver, Teller & ScarJo–is the most excited I’ve been for one of his movies in a minute

Unpopular (?) opinion(s): Fay Grim is the great Parker Posey movie. Dutch angles are funny

“My entire creative life […] has in one way or another sought to be a kind of resistance to complacent jargon, the dumbing down of complex realities into opinionated sound bites.” – Hal Hartley

Hartley comes home, to an apartment full of stock company, and makes a last film, his usual tools used to gentler ends, a film of ideas as always & a farce ofc. A movie for right now, about a director who wants to do something “useful & perennial. […] service that is constantly & forever required.”

most underrated films of the 70s 70: Rio Lobo 71: Sometimes a Great Notion 72: Junior Bonner 73: Breezy 74: Le milieu du monde 75: Milestones 76: Mado 77: Citizens Band 78: Paradise Alley 79: 1941

IRL fashion aside, I've yet to enjoy a Chalamet performance but know that I now live to see him acting, via Josh Safdie, like ping-pong is all that matters in the world www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI6-...

There's a Kurosawa retro at the local arthouse, so twice this week I spent the afternoon watching Mifune yawn his way through feudal Japan in Tohoscope, and both times the same two guys in the back just laughed their butts off the whole time. My tix cost $7.25 and ngl those guys deserve part of it

furthest N/S/W/E N: Prince George, BC S: Kolhapur, India W: Vancouver E: Busan, S Korea

Fifth time watching They All Laughed but somehow the first time I noticed Robby Müller's cameraman was none other than Ed Lachman. Lachman talks about Müller's love for Joel Meyerowitz, Cape Light in particular, and you can see it. Masters of soft light, the light between buildings.

Thinking about Americana’s aesthetic conservatism, how music that shrinks from the contemporary is somehow less alive, in relation to lines from a Sally Rooney novel: “We can’t conserve anything […] without altering their nature, steering some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way”

A dude bro left a crowded screening of The Tree of Life in a huff when the dinosaurs showed up, saying something like "aw hell no wtf" on his way out. Imagine if he'd stayed for the Sean Penn stuff.

You all sound v smart trashing Materialists but to me the deranged way in which it’s maybe kinda bad, with famous actors forced to downplay in an aspirational but tone-deaf minor key inside 35mm A24 Marriage Story long takes, is actually pretty watchable. Is Celine Song the Gracie Abrams of movies?

Caden’s not wrong, Castration Movie Anthology i is like nothing else. Scummy, feel-bad, endless, real. A cinema for the 2020s.

If Superman movies are pop songs, then this one is One Week

With Top Gun & Days of Thunder, Tony Scott said what if a movie was surface, and a generation of critics, aspiring to taste, lost their minds. Kosinski is no Tony Scott but Hollywood in 2025 is not 1986. Sure, put the force of an industry behind a career-length interrogation of veneer. Why not?

I dug F1. Sue me? Kosinski &co rehearsed 3 scenes w/stopwatches for 2 straight weeks, then filmed them back-to-back-to-back in 15 minutes. Total. In 1 take. Who does that? Roger Corman? Gorgeous dad fantasy nonsense w/fascinating process, like an Adam Hughes comic w/o the cheesecake. I'll take it.

My version of nostalgia is re-evaluating genres I hated the first time around: emo, pop-punk, nü-metal. They're not as bad as I thought OR I really am that old

Tickets to see Brand New in Worcester are so cheap, I almost thought of going, until I remembered why they're so cheap

Had to interrupt S.O.B. (1981, Blake Edwards) partway through in order to watch this scene nineteen times

Plunkett, Parobeck & Burchett snuck a Love & Rockets reference into Batman Adventures #12

“You’ve made one documentary I liked, out of how many — six?” Paul Reubens knew a hack when he saw one.

All I want or need from social media these days is Charli xcx apologizing for how good every M. Night Shyamalan movie is

Egg Cuber (1977)

A film that takes place where you're from

Me at work every day for the next thousand years

Just saw someone refer, in an apparently complimentary way, to There Will Be Blood as "Kubrick by way of George Stevens," and well if that isn't a perfectly succinct way to describe what I'm not crazy about from that period of PTA

There were times in my life when The White Lotus finale would’ve put me off TV for years but this time I pivoted to watching Justified, and the montage is so much more intelligent; rather than beat you over the head with subtext, the editing is in service to story. Dynamic instead of laborious.

Video store within walking distance as a kid. Masculin feminin from the library. Cult section within driving distance when I got my license. Older friend in college who showed me Ford/Fassbinder/Sirk/Archers. Then recovering from heart surgery at 25 to film noir, westerns, anything made before 1980

Movie you watched more than six times, gifs only

Oh, Canada is a true old man movie: baffling choices, insane pacing, more caustic than it seems. Eviscerates a boomer progressive type, like if Ken Burns had turned into Krishnamurti or D. Kucinich. Phosphorescent in any other movie would be awful but they sound gorgeous here. Lovely for no reason.

Is Bluesky too middle-aged for Film Twitter or am I not following the right accounts? Feels pretty quiet here still. How do we remake it in the image of a_film_by or Dave Kehr's comment section? Or is the appeal of those forums that they were oriented around appreciating older movies?

Coma (Bonello, 2022)

I found it hard to believe that Lucy Liu's character would tolerate old fashioned molding but as Soderbergh formal conceit movies go, Presence (2025) is his most Shyamalanesque, so I liked it. Horror without horror is, I'm afraid, my lane

Now if only I could do this on Letterboxd

The films of @axelleropert.bsky.social will be streaming on criterion channel on February 1!

Made the mistake of watching the new PWSA/Milla trailer, now all I want to do is watch more PWSA/Milla, but if I watch one, I'll watch them all… www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpfM...

Serge Daney new translation alert: a lengthy section of his computer notes. Thanks to Kino Slang. kinoslang.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-...

Millennials killed the sitcom only to pay Netflix to laboriously recreate it over what feels like centuries

Slap a moustache on Jude Law and I can't even recognize him