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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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Oct 11, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Brian Formo |Gemma Gracewood
Saturday Night Live is back for its 50th season, and it’s already receiving a bounty of anniversary goodwill. With Maya Rudolph, Dana Carvey, Jim Gaffigan, Andy Samberg, James Austin Johnson and Bowen Yang tackling the significant figures of the 2024 election cycle, the hallowed series has already posted its highest ratings since… well, the last election.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Gemma Gracewood |Brian Formo |Eternal Sunshine |Big Picture
“Hers was a unique eye,” says Lee director Ellen Kuras of the groundbreaking WWII photojournalist, Vogue model and her surrealist muse Lee Miller. “One could argue it’s a female gaze, but I tend to think of it as a humanist gaze; someone who really looked at people and cared about people and believed in justice.
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Ella Kemp |Brian Formo |Mitchell Beaupre |Marie Antoinette
It was a flop. The facts and fiction that made up the life of Marie Antoinette may never stop being disputed, but one truth is indelible: Marie Antoinette, on the big screen, did not thrive. The 2006 film’s director, Sofia Coppola, says so unashamedly. Box office takings weren’t great, reviews were mixed, the shoot was hard. While the process and final product were amazing and enlightening, the whole thing was so taxing that Coppola nearly gave up on filmmaking.
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Apr 19, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Brian Formo |Aaron Yap |Gemma Gracewood |Marie Antoinette
In Civil War, there’s a scene that is striking for how it lets Kirsten Dunst, briefly, engage with a war film like she’s on a Sofia Coppola set. Alex Garland’s latest feature is set in a fictional second American Civil War that’s been going on for an unknown number of years. Dunst plays tenured war photographer Lee Smith, whose reputation is widely known but has taken a decade-plus toll.
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Brian Formo |Annie Lyons
Monkey Mandeploys an underground boxer in Mumbai, who dons a monkey mask in the ring, to explore the iconography of Hanuman, God of Wisdom, Strength, Courage, Devotion and Self-Discipline. In making the visceral action film, Dev Patel couldn’t have had a more difficult road to getting his feature debut out of a movie industry boxing match and into the world.
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Mar 29, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Annie Lyons |Brian Formo
No one familiar with his work will be surprised by this insight, yet it still bears emphasizing: Julio Torres loved playing with his toys as a child.
As Torres grew up in San Salvador, El Salvador, his mother, an architect and designer, and his father, a civil engineer, cultivated his imaginative tendencies with care. “[I was] always just off in my own little world,” the multi-talented comedian tells me. “I was in a sort of daydream incubator growing up.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Mitchell Beaupre |Brian Formo |Mia Lee Vicino
It’s the 1950s, and a man has been murdered in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There’s no question about that. Lieutenant Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara) has been arrested and confesses to the act. The question, however, is whether or not Manion was justified. According to his wife Laura (Lee Remick), the deceased—a local barkeep named Barney Quill—raped her, which sent Frederick into a rage in which he shot Barney down.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Gemma Gracewood |Brian Formo
In a rehearsal studio in Burbank, Los Angeles, Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker are reflecting on their favorites from the recent awards season, predicting accurately that by the time this interview is published, Da’Vine Joy Randolph will have an Oscar for her work in The Holdovers. Brownstein and Tucker are the founders of Pacific Northwest indie rock legends Sleater-Kinney, which they formed in Olympia, Washington in 1994.
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Feb 19, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Brian Formo |Mitchell Beaupre
If you follow global cinema, you probably first heard of The Taste of Things under a different name: Tran Anh Hung’s film premiered at Cannes 2023 under the title The Pot-au-Feu. Despite that very French name (which is, literally, the pot on the fire—an important food dish in the culinary film), it was even retitled in France to La passion de Dodin Bouffant.
