Agnes Varda and JR Go On A Road Trip Packed With Engrossing Kindness In Faces Places

Iconic director Agnes Varda started out her filmmaking career with La Pointe Courte, a sobering look at a relationship in crisis, but her newest film is a complete 180 from 1955 feature in terms of tone. That newest directorial effort of hers is called Faces Places and one just feels pure joy from watching it. There are few movies I could say this about without some kind of caveat (The Muppets is one of the only other scant few titles I can think of to earn that distinction), but Faces Places really is that enjoyable to watch. From its humorous opening sequence establishing various ways that it's two lead characters did not meet to its heartfelt conclusion, Faces Places keeps a smile on your face and a sincere sense of kindness emanating from every fiber of its being.

Live In The Chaotic And Gruesome Here And Now With Nocturama

There isn't much in the way of background established for the lead characters of Nocturama in its opening scenes. We just get to follow a handful of college-aged young adults going about assorted pieces of business, with only minimal amounts of accompanying of dialogue, with this array of individuals occasionally bumping into each other amidst their routines before it's revealed that they're all in some kind of close-knit group together. There's a subtly intense vibe created here, an undercurrent of espionage that director Bertrand Bonello is able to sew into the fabric of seemingly mundane sequences.

Get In Tune With The Captivating Humanistic Beat Of BPM (Beats Per Minute)

What do you do when your government has abandoned you? What do you do when the pharmaceutical companies meant to create cures for what's killing you instead lollygag around? For those suffering from AIDS at the dawn of the 1990's, this could not be tolerated. Millions of lives had already been lost to this disease that was ravaging the worldwide population and yet those in power seemed to have made little to no progress in trying to help the sick and weary. Thus, the ACT UP group was started to champion the rights of AIDS-suffering individuals across the globe. BPM (Beats Per Minute) is all about following an ACT UP group located in Paris, France comprised of an eclectic coterie of people.

Nibble On Some Thoughtful Cannibalism With Raw

The most sublime entries in the world of horror fare tend to work best when its lead characters are well-rounded individuals whose plights already make for interesting cinema even before the blood, guts and what have you get unleashed. John Carpenter's The Thing and Halloween movie are great examples of this as are recent horror classics like Get Out, The VVitch and It Comes At Night. Hailing from France, the motion picture Raw, it turns out, is yet another example of a modern-day horror movie leaning just as heavily on characterization as it does on scares. This allows it to have an extremely thoughtful base rooted in relatable human experiences for it to build its insane, disturbing and gore-filled storyline upon.

The Saga Of Marjane Satrapi Is The Centerpiece Of The Riveting Animated Tale Persepolis

American cinema has basically resigned itself to solely dabbling in animated feature films in the case of making family-based features. There's nothing inherently wrong with that at all as the best Disney, PIXAR and LAIKA productions demonstrate but it is a pity that adult-oriented American animation at the cinematic level only crops up once in a blue moon with something like Sausage Party whose whole purpose to exist is to derive comedy from juxtaposing foul-mouthed gags with a medium of storytelling traditionally associated with children's fare. Luckily, many foreign countries have picked up the slack and delivered high-quality animated cinema that doesn't fit into the mold of traditional family movies.

Au Hasard Balthazar Is A Boldly Grim Cinematic Experience

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #35
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #16                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            One of the biggest no-no's in the world of cinema is hurting animals. Kill all the people you like (so long as they ain't kids) but hurting an innocent animal? You've gone too far. That's a really understandable phenomenon to me because animals are awesome and the sight of seeing an innocent creature with less capabilities than a human being experiencing pain just feels icky. That's why I've never been big on hunting and that's why movies have typically eschewed showing animals in dire pain, though there are exceptions of course. Satantango decided to just abuse a poor cat in one of its worst and most pointless scenes while Old Yeller is famous for its climax that results in the demise of the titular canine.

Jean Luc-Godard's Contempt Is An Oddly Thin And Mean-Spirited Movie in The Man's Filmography

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #30
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #12

Well hello Jean-Luc Godard, we meet again. After watching Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema recently for this series of reviews, I was intrigued to follow up that incredibly avant-garde experience with something more a bit closer to a conventional drama with his 1963 film Contempt, something I learned after watching the movie was actually quite autobiographical in nature. Turns out, Godard made the movie in response to the troubles he was having with his wife at the time, a woman he would divorce by 1965. That's interesting to learn though it still can't quite make me raise my not so positive opinion on Contempt.

Properly Maintaining Its Light Tone Is Not One Of The Stronger Suits Of The Mostly Pleasant L'Atalante

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #29
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #12

It can be tough sometimes to review classical movies through a millennial prism, only because not everything from older movies is going to hold up. Pieces of dialogue and actions now considered to be unacceptable in our modern society may have once been deemed fine as rain to do in even the most serious circumstances. You can even see this phenomenon in films made as late as the 2000's; there's plenty of gay panic jokes or gags that are incredibly demeaning towards the LGBTQA community in plenty of supposedly light-hearted comedies. Times change, but art is always stuck in the era in which it was made which means the vast majority of cinema, for instance, may carry over aspects from certain eras that seem unsavory in today's world.

Shoah Is A Devastating Look At Past Atrocities Through Riveting Present-Day Testimonies

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #28
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #29 (tied with Stalker)

I've been pondering how exactly to start this review, since it's difficult to figure out an introduction that would be proper for a review of the 1985 documentary Shoah. Us critics tend to label a lot of movies as "important" to the point of the word losing its original intended meaning, but Shoah truly is a motion picture more than worthy of being dubbed as an important piece of art. Here is an entire movie dedicated to chronicling video interviews with many individuals involved in some way shape or form with the Holocaust, one of the deadliest genocides to ever be committed on this planet that transpired in the early 1940's.

In The World Of La Jetee, Time Travel Can't Solve Everything

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #25
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #50 (tied with City Lights and Ugetsu)

And now it's time for the only short film on the Sight & Sound Greatest 50 Films List, La Jetee. This one's a French short film from director Chris Marker, one that uses high-concept notions of time travel to probe into universal human experiences, just like all of the great time travel movies such as Back To The Future, Looper, The Terminator and NOT Hot Tub Time Machine 2. This one's use of time travel hews closer to the likes of the Terminator movies in terms of tone and setting though due to it utilizing time travel in a post-apocalyptic setting where hope has become scarce and time travel is seen as a last hope to help the human race.

Personal Shopper Is A Fresh Take On Coping With Loss That Ain't Afraid Of No Ghost!

I've remarked in past reviews (namely my review of Manchester By The Sea) about how each of us grapples with the loss of loved ones in profoundly different ways. This also extends to how long each person copes with the passing of people near and dear to them. Some people can manage to filter all those emotions in a rapid manner and manage to go through the process of accepting this major quietus that has disrupted their lives, others take a much longer time to come to terms with this kind of event. No one ever fully overcomes the death of a loved one but it obviously varies in countless ways in terms of how long it can take people to return to a state of normalcy after these kinds of passings. For the protagonist of Personal Shopper, well, she may never be able to fully get over the death of a loved one that's causing her so much pain.

La Belle at ta Bete (Beauty and the Beast) Is A Classical Take On A Beloved Fairy Tale

The various 56 films in the Walt Disney Animation Studios canon have become so ubiquitous in pop culture, it can be difficult to remember that, for many of these feature films, they were not the first attempts to translate their source material to the big screen. There's been plenty of big screen versions of Cinderella beyond just the animated Disney version, for instance, Two other Snow White movies (one of them starring Betty Boop!) preceded Disney's historic animated Snow White motion picture in 1937. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Disney was far from the first studio to adapt the tale of Beauty & The Beast in feature-length narrative form.

The Passion Of Joan Of Arc Reveals The Humanity Of A Brave Historical Figure

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #13
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #9

As I've mentioned many times before how one of the best parts of Hamilton is the way it zeroes in on the humanity of larger than life historical figures. You get to fully understand the likes of George Washington, Aaron Burr (sir!) or Alexander Hamilton in a way that reminds you these were just human beings, like you or me, trapped in larger-than-life scenarios. Director Carl Theodore Dryer takes this same approach for his 1928 French film The Passion of Joan of Arc, which applies this style of storytelling to, as the title indicates, the real life figure of Joan of Arc, an individual with a story more than ripe for being told in the format of a feature film.

Let's All Go Pay A Visit To (Deep Breath) Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #6
Placement On Sight & Sound 50 Best Movies List: #35 (Tied with Psycho, Satantango and Metropolis)

Part of the reason why I wanted to go through all 50 films on Sight & Sounds 50 Best Movies list was because I wanted to get a better grasp on world cinema and the various filmmakers behind some of the most acclaimed motion pictures of all-time. I may be a proud film geek, but there are too many blind spots in my cinema knowledge to count and getting through this list would be a great way to do just that.  Plus, it would expose me to all kinds of movies made in a style that I was completely unfamiliar with, which, of course, is a way to segue into my newest review in this series, which covers the 1975 motion picture Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

Pierrot le Fou Review

When director Jean-Luc Godard sets out to make a movie, he isn't just embarking on a quest to create a motion picture. No, he's going on a journey to fiddle around with the conventional structures of the storytelling medium his works inhabit. He's out to find new ways to convey time passages or inner thoughts and to explore groundbreaking editing techniques that are still looked as landmark achievements decades after their release. If one were carrying a desire to see his specific traits as a filmmaker in action, look no further than his 1965 effort Pierrot le Fou, a prime example of these recurring practices of his.

Yuks Are Found By Juxtaposing Perfect Surroundings With Imperfect People In Playtime

Thank God I watched Terry Jones video introduction on the Criterion Collection DVD of Playtime before watching the movie proper, as it provided the proper set-up for what I was about to watch. Without that information at my disposal, I likely would have found the earliest sequences of Play Time impossible to get into due to their unorthodox style of storytelling and filming that intentionally tries to create distance between the viewer and what is occurring on-screen. Luckily, I not only managed to get into Playtime, I found it to be quite enjoyable and memorable thanks to a unique and audacious rhythm that it carries around.

The Rules Got Broken With Jean Renoir's 1939 Film The Rules Of The Game

The best Wikipedia articles strike me as akin to reading an engrossing book, one that makes you want to keep on scrolling down and reading more about the subject at hand. To that end, reading the expansive Wikipedia page for Jean Renoir's 1939 motion picture The Rules Of The Game fits those requirements like a glove, as it's quite interesting to read about the background of the film and the political climate of Europe in the late 1930's that greatly informed its story. Apparently, the movie generated a great deal of anger-driven controversy by depicting rich individuals with great amounts of influence in society as easily duped fools with selfish goals. Daring to mock the rich and powerful as self-absorbed just didn't sit well, even if the entire first week of Donald Trump as President of the United States seems to suggest the film's message about the upper-crust rings as true as ever.

The 400 Blows Review (Classic Write-Up)

One of the best parts about watching films like Breathless for the first time is getting the chance to dive deeper into an era of cinema dubbed by academics as the French New Wave. This span of time created numerous films that left a lasting impacting on the world of film as we know it, including popularizing and solidifying the concept of the auteur theory. This idea was given massive support from director Francois Truffaut, whose 1959 feature film, The 400 Blows, was not only one of the most famous movies of the French New Wave, but also the subject of the very review you're reading at this moment.

À bout de souffle (Breathless) Review (Classic Write-Up)

We all have A bout de souffle (Breathless) to thank for creating the very way films demonstrate in a visual manner time passing via the method of jump cuts. Numerous other films during the French New Wave utilized this particular technique of filmmaking, as well as works from George Melies, but the renowned popularity of A bout de souffle handily has made the feature the most lauded motion picture that brought the innovation of the jump cut to conventional visual storytelling.

Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) Review (Classic Write-Up)

I try to pride myself as being a cinematic connoisseur, but alas, the works of famous French director Jean-Luc Godard have been a notable blind spot for me in the world of film. That changed two days ago when I viewed my first ever film from that particular filmmaker, Bande a part (Band of Outsiders). Needless to say, this 1964 feature not only whetted my appetite to check out other effort from Godard, but also proved as a superb experience in its own right separated from the rest of the filmography of the director.