Claire Denis Creates A Quietly Terrifying Voyage Into Space With High Life

High Life opens with its lead character, Monte (Robert Pattinson), doing some repairs on the exterior of the spacecraft he and his daughter are traveling in. During this process, he accidentally loses grip of a tool that proceeds to float off into the void of space. As both he and the viewer watch this tool escape his grasp, High Life's way of depicting the vastness of space is made clear. In this film, the terrifying vastness of space is treated bluntly, only towards the end of the movie do more traditional grandiose depictions of the cosmos emerge. For much of its runtime, space is depicted as something simple: endless blackness that spells doom for all that enter it. It's a terrifying domain made all the eerier by the frank way Claire Denis films space, she frames High Life's characters against this empty void with no pomp, no circumstance.

Histoire(s) du Cinema Is An Academic Exercise That's Frequently Incoherent

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #27
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #48 (tied with The Battle Of Algiers)

Looks like I'm gonna have to adjust my reviewing procedures in order to properly tackle Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema. Just five minutes into this extended movie (which is broken up into eight individual segments), it was apparent I couldn't use the same reviewing barometers I used for, say, Going In Style recently. This isn't a conventional narrative film, but that's true of a lot of Godard's work. Histoire(s) du Cinema goes even further and isn't even trying to be like Godard's more abstract and unconventional dramas, it's basically an exercise in exploring the past of cinema in incredibly avant-garde ways that's mostly been made for himself and film academics.