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2 weeks ago | 
letterboxd.com | Xuanlin Tham |Robert Daniels |Ella Kemp |La haine
Liberté, egalité, fraternité. Blue, white, and red. Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui), Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé). What is the power of three? Three decades ago, La Haine exploded onto the world stage at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, winning 27-year-old Matthieu Kassovitz the prize of Best Director and searing its name—two deceptively soft-sounding French syllables for what we would imagine being snarled, hurled, splintering and enraged, hatred—into the annals of film history.
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2 weeks ago | 
letterboxd.com | Katie Rife |Ella Kemp |Big Business
Film gimmickry, like film grammar in general, has its roots in the silent period, when the possibilities of the new medium of cinema were being discovered in real time. In these exciting early decades, the emerging art of special effects wowed audiences, showing them things they had never seen before.
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1 month 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.
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2 months ago | 
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 25, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Ella Kemp |Siddhant Adlakha |A Night |Chhoti Si Baat
Mumbai comes alive in Payal Kapadia’s lyrical and lovely sophomore feature All We Imagine as Light: a soft, delicate film never lacking in depth, but offering to take your hand and nurture you for just a little bit. It is a balm for our times, our year, wherever and whenever it may find you: the story of Nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and her younger roommate Anu (Divya Prabha), as the relationships with the men in their lives ebb and flow.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Matt Goldberg |Ella Kemp |Jerry Maguire
Tom Cruise, despite the youthful energy that allows him to still run across buildings and jump off cliffs into his 60s, has always made for a unique heartthrob. Hollywood has never lacked handsome leading men, but Cruise always knew how to resonate with audiences by showing a softer, sensitive side of his persona. He was buffeted by a domesticity that rendered his characters’ sexual desires endearing rather than threatening.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Dominic Corry |Ella Kemp |No Escape
As a producer, Gale Anne Hurd is responsible for some of the most iconic and influential films of the past four decades. After coming up under the tutelage of infamous B-movie maven Roger Corman (who also sired filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante and Jonathan Demme) alongside future husband and filmmaking partner James Cameron, Hurd and Cameron teamed up to make 1984’s The Terminator.
