Like having Scenes of a Marriage + Repulsion + The Thing play simultaneously at 4x speed after palming Seconal and passing out on the bible. Near genius...

// what happens when you house two self-centered intellectuals & 'an immoral little slut' (libertine sexuelle) in a french villa for the summer... add sexual tension - then subtract it - add it again, divide by two - spend remaining time trying to self-rationlize your obsession with ignoring a woman. Boils down to a movie about a man gaining self esteem by not using his penis.

PURE PLEASURE HELLSCAPE - Religious statuaries shrouded w/hypnotic patterns + nameless angels frozen in spectral horror ask you to “Rejoice at your power to be God.” -what midnight mass would feel like for an ecclesiastical epileptic who slammed a speedball. {{ & he wandering junksick w/swaying rosary, palms to head, trying to drown out impious moaning from double exposed skulls}} Just another night in Granada..

A Kafkaesque collage of dream sequences that "doesn't show the man dreaming but the dream itself." We glimpse, as voyeurs, into a staged enactment of altered memory // Themes revolve around metamorphosis, insects, and guilt. There are hints of Lynch and Gilliam // Obscurity keeps it from full-on pretentiousness. From the beginning, no attempts are made to hide its uninterpretable surrealism. Plus, a zebra.

interlocking accounts of perversity & excess set in Hungarian fantasia // A charming visceral oddity, though at times slight // the cynosure is its shrewd cinematic design - Also, gruel gorging & jizz shooting are taken to 'new heights'

Nordic Mad Max treks silent in a gruesome spiritual parable. The film has a solid textural mood w/no narrative focus. I, too, felt like I spent 30 days adrift in a dense fog. Sparse story doesn't bother me but it seems to rely purely on grandiose abstraction. Every other shot is of a gloomy face silhouetted against cumulous clouds. I’d have been happier w/a little less arty ambition and a little more rock stacking //

A restrained, sensitive depiction of rough justice in rural america - Ree sulks through a wintery backwoods, studded with abandoned cars and leathered faces, trying to find answers essential to her family's survival. The story avoids contrivance and plays off the day to day nuances of ozark living. Ree's poverty is more a ...fact of life than something to transcend...

God forbid someone wants to commit suicide in a decent suit. Yes, it's an aesthetic avalanche - it's TOM FORD. He designs; he doesn't direct. Expect directorial indulgences. Besides, sometimes tragedy looks like a Helmut Newton spread....(I will admit Ford’s self-absorbed commentaries were an unnecessary agony) Aside from this, Firth was impressive.

I hope my review makes as much sense as the film: Willem Dafoe) furiously plows She (Charlotte Gains as the Christ becomes a rank but striking, self-cannibalizing of the sky, there is no serpent, only a vision for sexual sin & the fox "chaos reigns,"), woman is down to his gorgeous death. With the foaming ideologues & scream witch burners of the pornography. All in close-up, following from the snowflakes fall evil.

gritty & poetic story of individual ambition // a french muslim ascends the underworld through corrupt allegiances, shrewd power plays, & self-betterment. nice crime saga interwoven with lyrical hallucinations & sociopolitical allegories //

Stage-play on celluloid - Brando captivates as bad-boy ‘Snakeskin’ trying for a fresh start amid the social biases of a small southern town, but Williams’ sugary poetics clash with Lumet & seem convoluted. ..e.g., Any character could start out asking where the bathroom was & end up with a teary eyed utterance of "I tried to pour oblivion out of a bottle, but it wouldn't pour out." {{♥ Williams though...}}

gloomy&grimy// a quintessential noir w/skulking gangsters, drug addictions, dim side streets, & brutal beatings- all culminating in the crème de la crème of heist scenes. The film has paramount style & everything it needs to impress me - but somehow doesn’t. Apparently it's easier to break into a safe than the complexities of my admiration.

Had high hopes for greatness w/Connery as apocalyptic puss'n'boots. What I got instead: 8 g of high grade cinematic lithium that, upon injection to my orbital socket, provided a sensation of discomfort similar to that of the Judas Cradle. Occasional side effects of Zardoz are: dry mouth, nausea, the attempted evacuation of your soul to the nearest available host, & compulsive checking of the time on your cell phone.

Haneke constructs a monochrome masterwork about "the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature." An elegant, uncompromising exploration of evil, guilt, & innocence within a small Protestant village, whose hierarchical cruelty brings moral & physical deterioration upon itself. The children are eerie; the scissors are sharp // the parable, as in real life, provides no reassuring answers.

A sort of... postmodern Holmes & Watson investigates nordic sadism. Keeping the original title {Men Who Hate Women} would have made more sense. Noomi Rapace plays an endearing, offbeat version of 'victim turned heroine' but other than that - what starts as a decent mystery sort of.. hemorrhages dignity towards the end. Worth watching though //

Eternal ping-pong to mimic media-induced indifference, (mirror within a mirror) - :::puffs pipe::: “Jolly clever, I say, jolly clever....a mastermind of defaced reality and telly turmoil, hurrah...”

Törless, dressed as a Nietzschean bellhop, examines the world in an analytical and detached fashion, using intellectualism to justify his fascination with human cruelty. After much ‘cape fluttering’ and philosophical brooding, he blows his moral circuitry and accepts responsibility for his inaction against evildoing. -- a visually traditional // ethically complex // fascist allegory.

Bad Lieutenant wouldn’t quite work if it didn’t have confidence in its own absurdity. Watching Cage snort and gamble his way up and down Bourbon Street with an oversized handgun bulging frontside is engrossing enough to distract from any shortcomings. Missing is any sense of logic - Herzog’s solution: reptilian close-ups. // Cage’s ‘coked up Quasimodo cop’ makes this postmodern noir over-the-top but likable.

Successfully illustrates the downside to having an annoying cellphone jingle. Obscure and disorienting film // The murky interpretations of things seen (or not seen) creates a tension that dissolves into a fairly... straight forward narrative. Deals with repression, guilt, alienation.... political or personal. Side moral: HANDS ON STEERING WHEEL - OFF OF RELATIVES (??)

Analog Occultism, nice&grainy, 76 minutes // Trier shapes musty myth into potent poem - scant on script, heavy on style // We follow vengeful Medea through hazy bogs and foreboding fields towards egocentric tragedy. The actions of the tormented necromancer (though self-serving) seem eerily unavoidable, fated. Two visual gems: chiaroscuro like nuptial scene & grey mare bolting through shadowy catacombs

Lucas’ asexual dystopia cloaked in white is more innovative than expected. (White is an understatement - more like serious high-watt bleaching) Plus, it all seems strangely familiar...a self-sedating, mechanized society whose identity lingers after death in remnants of electronic data...hmm... Let us trust in the impassive ECJ [Electro Confessional Jesus] ...that is to say...”Could I be any more...<i>specific</i>?”

// I do applaud <i>The Virgin Spring,</i> w/ mise en scène primal and stark, whose ballad told does vengeance sing through fists of feudal patriarch //

“<i>Just look at that parking lot...</i>” I find the erosion of Larry Gopnik's suburban life a perfect couplet of humor and hardship. His faculties are tested (plight after plight in a sort of...hyperbolic karma assault) as he seeks a solution to the unanswerable <i>“why me?”</i> Jewish POV adds a unique backdrop to a universal question. Nice stylized production design.

Bourgeoisie black hole of incomprehension/ liquefied ornament of nothing. A glamorous fever dream of fractured time, gilded mirrors, and garden ghosts; appreciated but not adored. *See Also* Marienbad 2: Afternoon at Super 8 - “300 hours of experimental ice machine camera pans....crumpled plastic cups and mannequins slumped under cheap watercolors....the unashed cigarettes of time, suddenly unlit..?”

::taps intercom:: "Hello? Human Resources...? Paging HR...?" An aesthetic, moody exploration of existence and loneliness, echoing 60s sci-fi. Rockwell is superb in this cosmic Rubik's Cube of suspense and ambiguity.. story seems to thin towards the end. Kevin Spacey voices the composed GERTY - 2nd choice Morgan Freeman, Ben Stein? Alex™ the iMac system voice? Bottom line:Nice directorial debut. MORE EMPLOYEE BENEFITS

Not a cathartic masterpiece. While stylistically pleasing, I found that this pilgrimage of self-discovery fell short of effectiveness. Victor Sjostrom’s performance is touching, and the humanistic approach is expertly symbolic; but I found myself somehow unmoved. This proves ironic, as I blame my emotional apathy on my inability to find meaning in life while facing the prospect of death. (..aren't I a knee slapper..)

Personally, I appreciate being forcibly ‘springboarded’ beyond everyday emotional complacency and into the decayed underbelly of social brutality. Life itself is full of “unnecessary” and “gratuitous” violence and I find it somewhat...emotionally adolescent to drone about, and focus on, the audience’s “sensory violation” when more attention should be paid to how reversing the chronology of events can make us process the consequences of barbarity more deeply.

Two...er...death bones up for the hallucinatory ambience but it’s a fairly unholy cooperation of slack pace, eerie imagery, and sulking didgeridoo. I thought the haunting visuals would be enough to carry the film; by the end, however, the protagonist, the story line, and my expectations had flushed themselves down the sewer.