The Future Is Now #1

Dredd (Pete Travis, 2012)

The Son of No One (Dito Montiel, 2011)

Queensbridge looks eerily beautiful from above. Strange-looking structures surrounded by trees, scattered around with no apparent criteria, as if they had sprouted from the earth, it almost looks like something from another world. 

Dito Montiel's cinema is essentially impressionistic. Recollections of moods, places, events, people. Always too richly detailed to have been entirely made up. In The Son of No One, when his camera repeatedly hovers over the neighborhood, it's as if these buildings are hiding a million different stories, and he knows every single one of them.

R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen

Mysterious Island (Cy Enfield, 1961)

If it's easy, what's the point?

Ray Harryhausen's contribution to the art of cinema is ever more meaningful in an age where countless new films try (and fail) to convince me I should be in awe of their unbelievable (literally, not believable) CGI spectacles.

He has shown me things I might otherwise never have seen. For that, I will be forever grateful.

Veronica (Griffin Dunne, 2013)

Admittedly, the screenshots don't do justice to the tone of romantic despair that Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone convey so beautifully.

Griffin Dunne's Veronica is at odds with everything else in Movie 43. No irony, no faux-edginess; it's all heart. A real treat.

Deadfall (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2012)

Deadfall is a classic example of a film that lives on the strenght of its director's virtuosity. Given a terrible script to work with, Stefan Ruzowitzky makes the most of it by focusing on the basics of each individual moment: how do you shoot a car crash? How do you shoot a murder? How do you shoot a sex scene? Taken as a whole, the film doesn't make a lot of sense, but moment to moment, it's beautifully realized.

Buñuel Ever-present

 

This is 40 (Judd Apatow, 2012)

 

Vamps (Amy Heckerlink, 2012) 

Two movies watched yesterday.

Flight (Robert Zemeckis, 2012)

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II 

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IV

V

Five great scenes from Robert Zemeckis' Flight, a film so packed with cliches and heavy symbolism that only at the hands of a master craftsman could it have turned out as good as it is. Zemeckis is the most modern of filmmakers working in the classical Hollywood mold.