War porn voyeurism on a temporal fault line.

A film ostensibly about two people, but in the end it is fundamentally about one person. Persona attempts to make a statement about the convergence of the real and the unreal into the surreal.

The moralizing was a bit too bludgeoning. Not subtle, not nuanced, just in your face.

Charming, but tired. Several steps below the 1947 American trifecta of Brute Force, The Lady from Shanghai, and Out of the Past. An incredible year for American noir.

Glacial and lifeless.

I wonder if Bunuel, a nihilistic member of the Communist Party of Spain in the 1930s, had any role in The Red Death.

A travesty on every level. Zero stars really. The thought that this actually won some awards is a sad indictment on the horror genre.

Ozu’s films are like rice. Some are fried rice. Some are udon with white or brown rice on the side. And some are sushi with saki; like Equinox Flower. The End of Summer is just plain white rice. Simple, like all of Ozu’s films, but also very bland. I love Japanese culture, but I don't care for Ozu's films. They really aren't very Japanese, no matter what the cult says.

The feng shui force is strong in this film. I liked the arrangements in Equinox Flower better than some of his other films. I thought Shin Saburi gave a very fine performance. Still, the film is too long and it would have been better if there was a way to shut off the soap opera music in the background. Nice, terse ending.

The scene where Monica Vitti gets dressed up in black face is an unmitigated disaster. After Il Grido, L'Avventura and La Notte, this film has a heavy hangover feel to it.

A film in which too many scenes come across as antiseptic. I'm not sure if the ending was as bad as the one from The Departed, but it was a major letdown with multiple, contrived killings of a bunch of fellas in a very short period of time seemingly for the sake of getting to the end.

So, let me get this straight. Julianne Moore is on too many meds, Dennis Quaid is off his meds, and Dennis Haysbert is a door-to-door insurance salesman? OK, got it! And now, a word from our sponsors.

Audacious, depraved, funny, sad. Along with “Gimme Shelter” by The Stones, it’s a fitting bookend to the end of the Sixties.

De Sica’s sympathetic construct starts to wear thin with this entry. A beautifully shot movie, for sure. However, the film is so stylized (echoes of Citizen Kane) that it creates an aesthetic inconsistency between the visuals and the underlying social themes. Since it borrows heavily from Welles’ cinematic devices, I don’t view Umberto D. as a true neorealist piece.

I recently rewatched this and was very disappointed compared to my earlier recollection of the film. Boring and uneventful, a hollow shell compared to Kane. The character George was incredibly annoying.

Alternate Film Title - Bill The Butcher Goes to California

If film in its purest form is still photography brought to life, then L'Avventura is the perfect distillation of that philosophy.