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2 weeks ago | 
letterboxd.com | Jourdain Searles |Mia Lee Vicino |Annie Lyons |Unknown Pleasures
Since his feature debut Pickpocket in 1997, director Jia Zhangke has been steadily making films for more than 25 years, telling deeply human stories about love, loss and the constant, indiscriminate march of time. 2000’s Platform was Zhangke’s first foray into tracking the passage of time, depicting the societal changes within a small city in China from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Ella Kemp |Brian Formo |Annie Lyons
It was in the seventeenth century that John Donne wrote that no man is an island, and in the twentieth that Wim Wenders seemingly took that famous line of the English poet’s ‘Devotions upon Emergent Occasions’ and built a whole universe around it with Paris, Texas. “Entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” Donne’s writing continues. That man, in 1984, is Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton), and the main continent is America.
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Annie Lyons |Rafa Sales Ross |Kambole Campbell
You already know the story. Once upon a time, two children got lost in the woods—or were they abandoned?—and searched for home, leaving a trail of white pebbles—or was it candy?—to mark their path. Amid the thickly entwined branches, they encounter a hungry witch but, keeping their wits together, they outsmart their captivator and return home at last. And so on and so forth.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Matt Goldberg |Annie Lyons |Mitchell Beaupre
In a line that has rattled around our collective cultural consciousness for more than twenty years, Nicolas Cage’s blockbuster hero Benjamin Franklin Gates solemnly intones his plan to protect one of America’s most treasured documents. By stealing it. “I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence,” warns Gates, as he gazes over the legendary document while standing in the National Archives. In that pivotal moment of National Treasure, cinema history was made.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Annie Lyons |Rafa Sales Ross |Mia Lee Vicino |Steve Jobs
Nearly fifteen years on from The Social Network, the film’s final image remains prophetic as ever: in an empty room, Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg sits alone, endlessly refreshing his browser to see if his ex-girlfriend has accepted his friend request.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Dan Mecca |Annie Lyons |Ella Kemp |Roger Towne
“Baseball is a beautiful thing,” Bob Costas says at the beginning of Ken Burns’ documentary series Baseball. It’s also “a haunted game,” something journalist John Chancellor says moments later. Both things are true at the same time. No other game of sport so succinctly reflects the agony and ecstasy of American life.
When I was eleven years old, I was pitching in the championship game of my little league. We were up by one run in the bottom of the last inning.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Annie Lyons |George Fenwick |Ella Kemp
Francis Ford Coppola is no stranger to the shifting sands of time. From the churning familial history of The Godfatherand dual timelines of The Godfather Part II to the ephemerality of youth captured in The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, time weaves its way throughout the storied director’s 60-plus-year career. In Peggy Sue Got Married, the passing of years is bittersweet. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it’s downright crushing.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
sundance.org | Annie Lyons
By Annie Lyons“I feel like as a teenager, I never had the words that I wanted in the moment that they were needed. I found them later,” shares India Donaldson at the January 21 premiere of her feature debut Good One at The Ray Theatre in Park City, Utah. That idea comes to a rocky head in the filmmaker’s intimately nuanced coming-of-age story.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Annie Lyons
Rikers. Alcatraz. Devil’s Island. Sing Sing.
These are infamous carceral spaces with names that can instantly arouse a feeling of fear in a listening ear. Fear of incarcerated people and their ostensible legal transgressions, fear of confined space, stolen time and distance from a material reality spurred by selective intimacy and self-control.
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Jul 21, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Annie Lyons |Mia Lee Vicino |Gemma Gracewood
Ever felt lonely on New Year’s Eve? Taken at its most wondrous ideal, December 31 lends itself to the romantics, to toasts with friends, to sealing hopes with a kiss. But it’s also a holiday of expectations, one where loneliness and yearning can seep into the edges amid the champagne bubbles and shiny balloons.
