Ella Kemp

2 months ago | letterboxd.com | Mitchell Beaupre |Ella Kemp

From the beginning of his career, even as far back as his 1981 short film Peep Show, Atom Egoyan has been interested in the act of watching. What observation of others tells us about them, but just as much so what it says about ourselves. Rarely has that theme been more potent than in Exotica, released 30 years ago and standing strong as the director’s highest-rated film on Letterboxd.

Feb 27, 2025 | letterboxd.com | Kate Hagen |Ella Kemp |Gladiator II

“There’s no such thing as Best Actress,” said Julianne Moore as she accepted the Oscar in 2015 for Still Alice. Enough voters disagreed with Moore that year to get her on stage for a long-overdue trophy, but she had a point. Awards season is, of course, an endlessly entertaining, glamorous, and enriching celebration of cinema—a time to take stock of what the best (and most successful) films of the past year might tell us about the current state of pop culture.

Jan 17, 2025 | letterboxd.com | Ella Kemp |Kate Hagen |Bodies Bodies Bodies

Trying to be a good husband, Antonio Banderas’s Jacob says a line towards the end of Babygirl that could only be true if we lived in a world in which Babygirl didn’t need to exist.

Jan 7, 2025 | letterboxd.com | Ella Kemp |Rafael Motamayor |A Real Pain

One could argue that to be Jewish, practicing or otherwise, is to be full of shame and full of pain. But you could also argue that these things are, a lot of the time, part and parcel of being a member of any family. Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore feature as writer and director harnesses all of the qualities the filmmaker has broadcast as an actor for decades—boundless anxiety, neuroses, self-flagellation, the list goes on—in service of a personal story that is also deeply familiar.

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.