Ella Kemp

2 months 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.

Mar 24, 2025 | 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.