Grace Notes

cold just like december

on repression, torment and recovery on the eve of turning 22 For about 16 years of my life, charting from when I first developed some semblance of consciousness until age 20, few things would have felt more liberating than tearing my skin off whole. Not clawing it off in an

Blackhat

Originally published on 02/12/23 on Letterboxd Director’s cut- total ontological flux that begins with the destabilisation of a world built on borders and systems of exchange, and ends with two lovers turning its instruments of suppression against it. The volumes of Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard on Hathaway’

Napoleon

Originally published on 01/12/23 on Letterboxd Occupies an odd midpoint between antique sex comedy and fire-and-brimstone period epic. A curious film to view through Scott's background as a painter, in that the landscapes recall the Boucher-inspired compositions of films like Barry Lyndon and Scott's

Michael Clayton

Originally published on 22/11/23 on Letterboxd “You’re so fucked” All the more fitting that Sydney Pollack is in this because of how much it feels like the kind of film he might have made, during a time when this sort of brutal moral clarity and structural sparseness

Saint Laurent

Originally published on 05/11/23 on Letterboxd Delirium distilled- a twisted, ugly, gorgeous aesthetic object that is at once overwhelmed and totally unburdened by the weight of histories political and artistic. I think about the scene where Garrel (who- it must be said- is as beautiful here as he’

Nocturama

Originally published on 03/11/23 on Letterboxd We’ll slide down the surface of things… -Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis Suffering must be obviously futile if it is to be 'educational'. It is for this reason that our history is so unintelligible, and indeed, nothing that was true

Killers of the Flower Moon

Originally published on 26/10/23 on Letterboxd Curiously incurious- for all its sublimation within the perspective of the Osage and their mythology, there’s a perpetual distance maintained between Scorsese and whichever community he happen to be observing here. Interiority isn’t disregarded, of course- it’s just that

The Zone of Interest

Originally published on 13/10/23 on Letterboxd About once a decade, Jonathan Glazer emerges from hibernation to shatter whatever dominant conventions exist in the form of the genre he operates within- be it the revenge thriller or existential sci-fi—and quite simply what the definition of cinematic form even

Foe

Originally published on 10/10/23 on Letterboxd The consequences of Black Mirror- profoundly inane speculative fiction with its head so far up its ass it can’t see daylight, much less the fact that its central thematic conceit is just so fundamentally dull. Every conversation here is hollow bloviating,

Priscilla

Originally published on 09/10/23 on Letterboxd Often feels as if it’s fashioned from china- a work of such precise, suffocating formal precision and grace that the slightest disruption in its structure might case the film to shatter into hundreds of shards. That very fragility, of course, is

All of Us Strangers

Originally published on 08/10/23 on Letterboxd Quintessentially Andrew Haigh in the all-consuming sadness it mines in queerness as isolation, but it becomes all the more harrowing when the spectrality Haigh is so skilled at locating in everyday life takes on a more literal meaning. At various points throughout

Hit Man

Originally published on 06/10/23 on Letterboxd Very Lubitsch in its comedic sensibilities- there’s a precarious balance between Linklater’s indulgence in genre here and the maintenance of life-and-death stakes, and somehow he never truly allows either sphere to overwhelm the other. Comparisons to the regional specificity of

Saltburn

Originally published on 04/10/23 on Letterboxd Anything short of abysmal would’ve been an improvement on Promising Young Woman but I’m genuinely taken aback by how much I liked this- fun, sexy and a little gross (like all films should be). Very important representation for people who

Jawan

Originally published on 11/09/2023 on Letterboxd Don’t think I’ve had as much fun with anything in a theatre this year as I did with this sprawling, often incongruous ode to the living myth that is SRK. As with virtually any double role he’s played, Azad

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Originally published on 04/09/2023 on Letterboxd A totemic text about, amongst many subjects, the colossal failure of cinema to live up to Griffith’s conception of it as a universal language that might eliminate the very kind of violent, corrosive prejudice that his own work often lent itself

Serpico

Originally published on 18/08/2023 on Letterboxd Don’t know if there’s a more concise summation of how my tastes have evolved than the fact that I’m mostly lukewarm now towards a film I would’ve adored 3 or 4 years ago. Lumet’s commitment to what

The Idiots

Originally published on 16/08/2023 on Letterboxd “She let me hit cause I’m goofy”: The Movie. Went into this pretty much entirely blind, and since I’m largely unfamiliar with pre-2000s Von Trier (with the exception of the excellent The Kingdom), discovering what this is actually about was

The Bridges of Madison County

Originally published on 10/08/2023 on Letterboxd We’re hardly two separate people now…” “The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out, but glad I had them” ”I don’t want to need you” ”Why?” ”Because I can’t have you” ”What difference does that

On Damnation, Hellfire and Other Such Irrevocable Facts Concerning the Mortal Vessel in Oppenheimer

“It’s the bomb that didn’t go off. The threat that no one knew was there- that’s the bomb with the real power to change the world”. -Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020) “I am banished from the patient men who fight They smote my heart to pity, built my

Past Lives

Originally published 16/07/23 on Letterboxd Can’t help but feel that this is far too considered and dramaturgically suffocating for what it is, and it never quite rids itself of the reek of faux-profound Sundance slop, but this is otherwise a pretty impressive debut feature (even if so

All That Heaven Allows

Two capsules on the film, each from a different platform: Originally published on Letterboxd on 13/07/23 One of those rarefied works of art that brings tears to my eyes not because of the magnitude of emotional turmoil on display, but because of how gloriously radiant its images are.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Originally published 11/07/23 on Letterboxd Worthless slurry of computer-generated sludge and hollow nostalgia. For all its absence of Spielberg’s generally fine-tuned sense of pacing and momentum, Crystal Skull’s earnest fascination with the semiotics of 50s pulp serials, alien invasions and the legacy of the atom bomb

Sundance London 2023: You Hurt My Feelings

Originally published 09/07/23 on Letterboxd A pleasantly low-stakes, languorous Late-style picture about taking comfort in mediocrity. There’s a rather acerbic dryness to this, where Holofcener seems to be lambasting herself as much as she does the upper-middle-class professionals with cushy jobs that she so acutely paints an

Sundance London 2023: Mysterious Skin

Originally published 08/07/23 on Letterboxd “As we sat there listening to the carolers, I wanted to tell Brian that it was over now and that everything would be okay. But that was a lie, plus I couldn't speak anyway. I wish there was some way to

Sundance London 2023: Passages

Originally published 08/07/23 on Letterboxd Wrote about the film more extensively here, but what this viewing months after Berlin has solidified is that unlike most of the ephemeral festival-circuit pastel-hued queer dramas that the film’s co-opting by MUBI has lent itself to seemingly being part of, it