Barely even a movie, but in the rare moments it is one, it’s alright. Bring back the evil (less sentimental) Whannell of Saw, Upgrade and Invisible Man.

real potential for an all-time-worst best picture win this year

Watched on Friday January 17, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday January 14, 2025.

Watched on Monday January 13, 2025.

Watched on Sunday January 12, 2025.

Watched on Saturday January 11, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday January 8, 2025.

Watched on Monday January 6, 2025.

Projections of a shared reality. By the end of the film, its shared reality is the reality of fiction itself, in which a wish can be realised as easily as reality can be realised simply by experiencing it.

The film works so well because Spielberg spends the first act adequately building a science-fictional reality in narrative time grounded in the realist techniques of American filmmaking in the wider late celluloid era.

When the film lapses into its new-wave 21st century components, its visions of the future coalesce until David finally and crucially wishes to return to the past, the past of another narrative time, the narrative time of fairytale.

In the end, narrative time forecloses itself. David dreams fiction forever. In dreaming fiction forever, he becomes a real boy.

Watched on Tuesday December 24, 2024.

Eggers’ career-best work is this woozy dream of a film in which pandemic-era power plays are displaced from the 21st century COVID era to 1800s Germany. Being locked in bed at home for six weeks while your husband is away falling into the arms of an older man like a stand-in for you? How very 21st century. Vampirism is and isn’t a metaphor as power dynamics collapse in on each other and more or less nobody is left standing, certainly the marriage institution falls by the end of the film. Not just the secular marriage of contract law either, but marriage eternal; that’s fallen too.

Screensavercore

Watched on Monday December 16, 2024.

Watched on Sunday December 15, 2024.

Watched on Sunday December 15, 2024.

In the vulgar auteurism era of Letterboxd I read literally countless essays about De Palma and this film in particular, predominantly about Femme Fatale's function as a filmic meta-text, a dream of cinema's potentiality through the function of noir.

It's taken me all these years to actually watch the damn thing and what surprised me most was that it's largely a film of jokes, shockingly similar to Michael Snow's avant-garde comedic opus *Corpus Callosum.

Femme Fatale is a film of a flattening reality, reality that gets flattened into diegesis, with no creator, no auteur behind the camera, just diegesis itself. If there is a joke, that's the joke. But then maybe I was laughing at nothing after all.

Watched on Wednesday December 11, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday December 11, 2024.

One of the behemoths of contemporary filmmaking and not just in runtime, Diaz goes completely ruthless in A Tale of Filipino Violence with a seven-hour-long treatise on what it means to meditate about violence both before and after the fact. Does the consideration of violence replicate its conditions? How does the replication of violence through media representations (including film) create cultural memories? Can a cultural memory be 'true' or is this a contradiction in terms? Who lives in the empty spaces? The ghosts of the future.

Watched on Monday December 9, 2024.

Watched on Sunday December 8, 2024.

Watched on Saturday December 7, 2024.

Watched on Sunday December 1, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday November 26, 2024.

Watched on Saturday November 9, 2024.

Watched on Friday November 8, 2024.

Watched on Sunday November 3, 2024.

Watched on Thursday October 31, 2024.

Watched on Thursday October 31, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday October 30, 2024.

Watched on Monday October 28, 2024.

Watched on Monday October 21, 2024.

Watched on Sunday October 20, 2024.

Watched on Sunday October 13, 2024.

So actively dramatically unsatisfying you have to admire it a bit. Every character & scene works in service of nothing, so the film as a whole becomes a fascinating blank check exercise in denial. “Please just, just stop singing.” So post-dramatic it’s almost dead on arrival but I knew its chilly reception going in and as a result found it extremely easy to engage with this moment to moment. Definitely my favourite Phoenix performance this side of The Master. Didn’t like it much. No notes.

Benning's late-career reintegration of text into his blunt-edge formalist landscape objects reaches a kind of ideal peak here with the film's ending joke. Throughout the film's runtime, the filmmaker The United States of America most reminded me of was Marguerite Duras. Benning's film consistently stages a rupture between its visual and aural meanings, echoing Duras' omniscient subjectivised cinema.

In classic Benning style, the subject of the film is as much the landscape captured as it is Benning himself, the myth-constructor behind the camera. He's been getting very cheeky in recent years. Welcomed. Benning's only postmodern film? Maybe, but it's more than that, it's also a kind of sly modernist excavation of the consciousness of 21st-century America.

Watched on Tuesday October 1, 2024.

Pretty old fashioned future you have there

Watched on Saturday September 21, 2024.

tfw u are the thing u hate

I'm increasingly deeply invested in Saulnier's career through a traditional auteurist lens, the kind of directorial investment rare for filmmakers working in the 21st century. That is to say that none of his individual films are particularly interesting to me yet as a cumulative whole there is a fascinating antithesis growing, between the material Saulnier is interested in and the political demands of articulating said interests.

Watched on Monday September 16, 2024.

Dreyer’s extraordinary and contradictory ability to sublimate legitimate religious impulse into secular artistry is almost hard to comprehend. Johannes the voice of God and the auteur, stopping then restarting time.

Watched on Friday September 13, 2024.

This still absolutely rules.

Watched on Wednesday September 4, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday September 4, 2024.

Watched on Saturday August 31, 2024.

Stunning fantasy rendition of travelogue documentaries, filtered through every genre imaginable. Can’t believe nobody else has mentioned or discussed the diptych structure of this, which is its strongest element!

RIP to a real one. Ranked as I revisit, I’ve seen all his major work before, though. In this context ‘Twin Peaks’ stands in only for the Pilot episode, which I like a significant amount more than I like much of what follows (though I note I always enjoy S02E01-S02E10 significantly more than Season 1).

• Mulholland Drive
• Eraserhead
• Wild at Heart
• Blue Velvet
• Twin Peaks
• The Elephant Man
• Dune

You've noticed that Hollywood has its energy back, often in surprising places -- even though the studios are complaining about a lack of ticket sales and diminishing box office returns. International cinematographers are working alongside major Western auteurs. Great directors make bad movies and bad directors make great movies. Culture is so diasporic now that you can't even rely on everybody to have seen Dune: Part Two. The biggest musical star on the planet, Taylor Swift, released a new album you didn't even hear about until a week after its release. This lack of awareness extends to your engagement with streaming services: Zaillian's fairly good television show Ripley came out on Netflix without a trace of critical or commercial engagement. Nonetheless it's a real television series, the kind of thing you haven't been seeing much since around oh, who knows, 2018? With this said, film is starting to overtake television again. Serialisation is dead. You've noticed audiences turning out in unusually high numbers for bizarre artistic projects. At the beginning of the year, you played a game about a Demon whilst sitting in a circle. You think you might have accidentally called a Demon to attach itself to you. You've been reading Crowley and other esoteric practitioners and trying to wrap this into your work more. You think that filmmaking in itself is a kind of ritualistic spellcasting. Think about this: Fincher repeating the same take sometimes fifty times.... until something is evoked. Until what is evoked? The prevention of a medium's death knell through the sheer repetition of the practice of medium-making. You are the demon attaching yourself to a medium such that it can vampirise you, continue its everlasting progress. And what is progress anyway? Why can nobody make a simple film anymore? A film about just one idea? Anyway, you're getting more casual about it all. You don't mind eating a snack at the movie theatre these days.

1. I Saw the TV Glow
2. Hit Man
3. Chime
4. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
5. When the Light Breaks
6. Nosferatu
7. Joker: Folie à Deux
8. Cloud
9. Juror #2
10. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"I was always happy to do any type of film."

The greatest of the New Hollywood movement, truly exciting, constantly innovative (even into the 21st century), pushing the boundaries of all genres he worked within.

1. Twixt
2. Apocalypse Now
3. The Godfather Part II
4. Rumble Fish
5. One from the Heart
6. The Conversation
7. The Godfather Part III
8. Tetro
9. Peggy Sue Got Married
10. Youth Without Youth

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

By release date.

Television Favourites:
The Leftovers (2014 - 2017, Damon Lindelof & Tom Perotta)
Hannibal (2013 - 2015, Bryan Fuller)
Lost (2004 - 2010, Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse)
Bojack Horseman (2014 - 2020, Raphael Bob-Waksberg)
Girls (2012 - 2017, Lena Dunham)
Nathan For You (2014 - 2017, Nathan Fielder)
Review With Forrest Macneil (2014 - 2017, Andy Daly, Jeffrey Blitz, & Charlie Siskel)
Twin Peaks (1990 - 2017, David Lynch & Mark Frost)
How To With John Wilson (2020 - 2023, John Wilson & Nathan Fielder)
The Rehearsal (2022 - ????, Nathan Fielder)
Severance (2022 - ????, Dan Erickson, Mark Friedman)

• Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory
• Annabelle Serpentine Dance
• The Trust, or The Battles for Money
• Tragic Error
• The Torture of Silence
• La Roue
• Ballet Mécanique
• Strike
• Battleship Potemkin
• Napoleon

...plus 323 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

To be very clear about this, M. Night is one of the more accomplished craftspeople of this generation. The first eight films here are perfect. All of them are good.

1. The Village
2. Signs
3. Knock at the Cabin
4. Split
5. The Visit
6. The Happening
7. Unbreakable
8. Lady in the Water
9. The Sixth Sense
10. After Earth

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The films I will be seeing.

1. When the Light Breaks

   Saturday 17th August
   10.30AM
   Lumiere Cinemas

2. No Other Land

   Sunday 18th August
   10AM
   Lumiere Cinemas

3. Days of Heaven

   Sunday 18th August
   3.30pm
   Lumiere Cinemas

4. Problemista
5. The Beast

   Sunday 25th August
   7pm
   Lumiere Cinemas

6. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

   Tuesday 27th August
   11.15AM
   Lumiere Cinemas

7. A Mistake

   Tuesday 27 August
   8.30PM
   Lumiere Cinemas

8. Black Dog

   Thursday 29 August
   6.30PM
   Lumiere Cinemas

9. Birdeater

   Thursday 29 August
   8.45PM
   Lumiere Cinemas

10. Grand Tour

    Friday 30 August
    1.30pm
    Lumiere Cinemas

Artists find ways to continue working among Hollywood’s cracks. Streaming services continue to spend unbelievable amounts of money on unbelievably obscure vanity projects. 'Auteurs' from the past are resurrected. The biggest arthouse director you know is self-imploding. Nothing matters anymore!

Also:
How To With John Wilson (Season 3)
Silo (Season 1)
Yellowjackets (Season 2)

1. Aggro Dr1ft
2. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
3. Knock at the Cabin
4. Touch of Crude
5. GANGBANG
6. Oppenheimer
7. The Boy and the Heron
8. May December
9. About Dry Grasses
10. Présages

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. My Own Private Idaho
2. Down with Love
3. I'm Really Scared When I Kill in My Dreams
4. The Demons
5. A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge
6. Mulholland Drive
7. Tropical Malady
8. Good Will Hunting
9. Salem's Lot
10. Sense8: Happy F*cking New Year

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

What comes next, after Hostel, after Saw?

These two aforementioned franchises acknowledge the dense, explicitly American horror of Abu Ghraib. The Hostel series in particular are a beautiful duet of films that acknowledge the intense trauma brought upon the external world by the naivete of American narcissism. The Saw films are a little less intelligent, like moralistic fables; they are the bedtime stories, if you will, of the so-called 'torture-porn' genre. The Human Centipede and The Human Centipede 2 in turn critique the genre's desire to continually 'make grotesque' and to intentionally and actively 'gross out,' whilst also critiquing fans of the genre themselves.

I posit that there has been a turn - starting in 2015 with Tara Subkoff's #Horror and Tom Six's The Human Centipede 3 - to reintegrate images of torture into an accessible domestic tableau; to reintegrate the sublimity of this 'foreign' torture into the neoliberal milieu.

What does that mean? 'Torture' looks like something else now, something less recognizably physical. Call it a psychiatric turn if you will, but note this is not 'elevated' horror whatsoever, to the extent that even Saw and Hostel are now becoming psychiatrised. And, yes, 'torture-porn' is an explicitly American genre.

• The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence)
• #Horror
• 31
• Good Time
• Revenge
• Unsane
• The House That Jack Built
• Dragged Across Concrete
• Halloween
• Hunted

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A year in which mainstream cinema kicked ass at scale.

1. Against Time
2. Skinamarink
3. The Fabelmans
4. TÁR
5. RRR
6. Aphotic Zone
7. Bones and All
8. Avatar: The Way of Water
9. Babylon
10. X

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A movement in formation, kickstarted by Lynch & Frost in 2017. Cringe poetics and cringe comedy combine. Surrealism becomes the modicum of emotion. 'Stress' is a structural entity placed upon the idea of duration and pace. Therefore 'stress' becomes an empathic constraint. The American landscape is defined by the desert & its gentrification. Women are boxed back in again. "We reflect the local community."

1. Twin Peaks: The Return
2. Too Old to Die Young
3. The Outsider
4. Copenhagen Cowboy
5. The Curse

One of my favourite genres deploys non-actors and actors-as-themselves with aplomb. Formal considerations become the same as conceptual considerations and vice versa. The idea of 'truth' breaks down - this becomes useful for us when thinking about fiction in other contexts.

With the exception of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, The Tom Green Show is obviously the progenitor of the way this type of work functions in the contemporary era..

Of course Nathan For You: Finding Frances stands in for the whole show, and How To With John Wilson and Review With Forrest Macneill qualify. So does The Rehearsal, Paul T. Goldman and Jury Duty. Arguments could be made for It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

On the reality TV front, quality aside, must-sees are Impractical Jokers, Taskmaster and Punk'd.

• Symbiopsychotaxiplasm
• Schizopolis
• Gummo
• Freddy Got Fingered
• Jackass: The Movie
• Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½
• Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
• Jackass Number Two
• Nirvana the Band the Show
• The Girlfriend Experience

...plus 28 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films seen in NYC.

Theatre:
- Hadestown (5 stars)
- Sweeney Todd (bad production)
- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (genuinely extraordinary, near-perfect production, obvious ethical issues and aesthetic failures)
- Trail of Terror Stamford (so fun, the American experience!)
- Merrily We Roll Along (5 stars)
- Here Lies Love (flawed but fine, very liberal in a kind of toothless way)
- Here We Are (very good, complex material realised well, if a little "why now?" - we know why now, of course)
- Arca - Mutant;Destrado (this was fine, not as theatrical as it should have been to be considered performance art - just a concert)
- The Lion King (fine, great production but tired actors and material)
- Dead Man Walking (extraordinary opera, not quite five stars but close, I can't imagine a better version of this material)
- And Then There Were None (NYU Tisch, strong production given the material and that it's a student production but some major issues with loss of energy as production went on)
- Sleep No More (10/10
- I Need That (4/10)

• more than everything
• Let Your Light Shine
• moon blink
• La Roue
• Bijou
• GANGBANG
• Allensworth
• Air Force Two
• Boyd v. Denton
• The Raven

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The closest we have to a contemporary visionary like Fulci, yet we shouldn't underestimate Flanagan's connection with the work of Stephen King. These works in large part engage in the intersection between class structures, terror and the manifestation of guilt in American society. Flanagan's ability to traverse visual representations of class guilt at different scales is his greatest asset. The first eight works here are major.

1. The Haunting of Hill House
2. Gerald's Game
3. Midnight Mass
4. Ouija: Origin of Evil
5. The Haunting of Bly Manor
6. Doctor Sleep
7. Hush
8. The Fall of the House of Usher
9. Oculus
10. Before I Wake

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is, in part, for personal reference. I have included both writing and directing credits. This is also to assess the legacy of two filmmakers straddling two worlds rather dangerously - especially as the next five years will dictate their legacies.

1. Marriage Story
2. Frances Ha
3. Little Women
4. Margot at the Wedding
5. While We're Young
6. Mistress America
7. Fantastic Mr. Fox
8. The Squid and the Whale
9. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
10. Greenberg

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Ignoring shorts for now, not in ignorance of their accomplishment but because they are too varied and complex to take into account. Additionally, and in a different way to most artists, Lynch's shorts are almost 'workings-out' of ideas that he later succeeds with in his features, so are less 'complete' than the twelve films pictured here. I need to reassess a few of these; the top five are all 5-star films for me and it wouldn't surprise me if these all, including Dune, attain the 'perfect' rating as I revisit them.

1. Twin Peaks: The Return
2. Mulholland Drive
3. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
4. Inland Empire
5. The Straight Story
6. Lost Highway
7. Eraserhead
8. Blue Velvet
9. Twin Peaks
10. Wild at Heart

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Here are a list of films referenced in the appendix of my first book, Inside the Castle, published by Amphetamine Sulphate.

It is now out of print.

1. Flesh
2. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
3. Spontaneous Combustion
4. The Birth of a Nation
5. Once Upon a Time in the West
6. Sleepaway Camp
7. Water in Milk Exists
8. Evening Glow Over

My second book Circles is out of print. 

This is a list of films that influenced and coloured the composition of the text.

CIRCLES is a poet's film about the kinesis of violence, a codex of ritual horror and youthful jubilation, lexically assembled as if by a troubadour in the dreamworld of a self-referential loop, in relation to abject cultural tableaus, nuances and ellipses.

::::::::::

• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• American Psycho
• The Dark Half
• Lake Mungo
• The Haunting of Hill House
• Inland Empire

1. Tommaso
2. Possessor
3. David Byrne's American Utopia
4. The Haunting of Bly Manor
5. First Cow
6. The King of Staten Island
7. The Invisible Man
8. Maggie's Farm
9. Let Them All Talk
10. Psycho

He's fallen out of favour recently but this is only natural for an artist disappearing into their own obsessions. He will one day emerge out the other side with another stone-cold populist classic, but with years of practice creating images more frequently startling than those made by any of his contemporaries.

1. Too Old to Die Young
2. Touch of Crude
3. The Neon Demon
4. Copenhagen Cowboy
5. Fear X
6. Drive
7. Only God Forgives
8. Pusher
9. Bleeder
10. Valhalla Rising

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Knock at the Cabin
• Skinamarink
• Memoria
• James Acaster: Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999
• High Flying Bird
• The Other Side of the Wind
• Twin Peaks: The Return
• Everybody Wants Some!!
• Nausea
• EMBARGO

...plus 124 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I just need to watch these before 2032, wish me luck.

1. Shoah
2. Some Like It Hot
3. Wanda
4. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
5. The Apartment
6. Daughters of the Dust
7. The Third Man
8. Touki Bouki
9. La Jetée
10. The Gleaners and I

...plus 60 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It is my hope that the ever-changing parameters of taste continue to shift even as they consolidate. Some particular interests of the past have now faded from this list (Greenaway and Shyamalan both make no appearance here, despite my love for them), and new choices emerge.

1. Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory
2. Annabelle Serpentine Dance
3. Tragic Error
4. The Torture of Silence
5. La Roue
6. Sherlock Jr.
7. A Cottage on Dartmoor
8. The Rainbow Pass
9. Rear Window
10. Pyaasa

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

What movies can be with or without plots &/or what movies are when they have plots but they aren't the main thing &/or what happens when plots become symbolic &/or moviemaking outside America.

Chronological order.

1. Ballet Mécanique
2. Battleship Potemkin
3. Woman in the Dunes
4. Pierrot le Fou
5. Zorns Lemma
6. Deep Red
7. Eraserhead
8. Stalker
9. All That Jazz
10. One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later

A year in which the ouroboros succeeded. A year in which we got another poor adaptation of Dune. A year in which it would be fucking hard to tell a coherent narrative. A year in which all of my picks (except one) engage in a politics of the residual past. A year in which we aren't in the post-COVID mediascape just yet, so every single one of these excellent films is clinging on to something that hasn't fully disappeared just yet but will soon enough. A year of half-truths. A year in which even the knock-out films aren't surefire knock-outs. A year of rest and relaxation.

1. Memoria
2. Train Again
3. West Side Story
4. Jungle Cruise
5. From Bakersfield to Mojave
6. The French Dispatch
7. Licorice Pizza
8. Zeros and Ones
9. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
10. Titane

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In the midst of going through a retrospective at the moment, so ratings subject to change in the short-term.

1. Cosmopolis
2. Eastern Promises
3. eXistenZ
4. The Fly
5. Dead Ringers
6. The Brood
7. Videodrome
8. M. Butterfly
9. Crash
10. Crimes of the Future

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Peeping Tom
2. Psycho
3. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
4. Black Christmas
5. Halloween
6. Alien
7. The Driller Killer
8. Friday the 13th
9. Maniac
10. The Funhouse

...plus 55 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Alexandra's Project
• Zapped!
• 2:37

November 5 - 21

1. The Power of the Dog
2. Beau Travail
3. There Is No Evil
4. Drive My Car
5. A Hero
6. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
7. Flowers of Shanghai
8. The Painted Bird
9. Memoria
10. The Hand of God

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• A Page of Madness
• Crossroads
• Ugetsu
• Sansho the Bailiff
• Godzilla
• The Human Condition I: No Greater Love
• Good Morning
• The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity
• The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer
• Pitfall

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Toolbox Murders
2. The Mangler
3. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
4. Spontaneous Combustion
5. Invaders from Mars
6. The Funhouse
7. Mortuary
8. Djinn
9. Salem's Lot
10. Eggshells

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I'm a less active film viewer than I once was, these are the 25 films that stick out to me - largely from my present memory - as major accomplishments and constant favourites.

1. Mulholland Drive
2. Twin Peaks: The Return
3. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
4. Toolbox Murders
5. Sherlock Jr.
6. The Visit
7. La Roue
8. Alien
9. Mirror
10. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

also bojack horseman
n hannibal

• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• Poltergeist
• Melancholia
• Midsommar
• The Show About the Show
• The House That Jack Built
• Saw IV
• Saw V
• Saw VI
• Saw 3D

...plus 23 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. 'R Xmas
2. Tommaso
3. The Blackout
4. China Girl
5. King of New York
6. The Addiction
7. Ms .45
8. New Rose Hotel
9. Go Go Tales
10. Bad Lieutenant

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

To be haunted by some other version of yourself is, really, what all haunting is, but this list is intensely literal: all of these films include individuals who experience themselves in another tense. I am interested in the ways that material experiences affect psychologies in horror movies, that is to say that these individuals all experience something material that displaces their naturalised body. In INLAND EMPIRE Laura Dern haunts her own movie set from the future, more knowledgeable. In The Haunting of Hill House and Lake Mungo, women foresee their own deaths in the form of literal hauntedness.

Recommendations welcomed. I would like to track the chronology of this motif and idea over time, ultimately working out where the roots of this idea came from. This is just a starting point.

Also:
The Life of Chuck, Stephen King, [2020]

1. Slumber Party Massacre II
2. The Dark Half
3. Inland Empire
4. Lake Mungo
5. The Haunting of Hill House

no american honey because i don't like it.

• A Zed & Two Noughts
• Baby Driver
• Down with Love
• Easy Rider
• Magic Mike
• Magic Mike XXL
• Marie Antoinette
• Perfect Lives
• Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Freedom.

1. La Roue
2. Blind Venus
3. Napoleon
4. The Torture of Silence
5. The Tenth Symphony
6. Au Secours!
7. End of the World
8. J'accuse
9. The Madness of Dr. Tube
10. I Accuse

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Television:
1. The Leftovers
2. Hannibal
3. Twin Peaks: The Return
4. Watchmen
5. Nathan For You
6. Review With Forrest Macneill
7. Bojack Horseman
8. The Haunting of Hill House

Literature:
1. Creepshots, Simon Morris
2. Civil War, Simon Morris
3. Watching the Wheels, Simon Morris
4. Sea of Love, Simon Morris
5. Bosun, New Juche
6. Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann
7. The Institute, Stephen King
8. Fale Aitu: Spirit House, Tusiata Avia

Theatre:
1. Frankenstein, Free Theatre Christchurch
2. Betroffenheit @ Saddler's Wells
3. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Court Theatre
4. The Wholehearted, Massive Theatre Company
5. Misery, The Court Theatre
6. The Winter's Tale, Free Theatre Christchurch
7. Alice, Free Theatre Christchurch

Music:
1. This Is Happening, LCD Soundsystem
2. Yeezus, Kanye West
3. Norman Fucking Rockwell, Lana Del Rey
4. The Life of Pablo, Kanye West
5. Emotion, Carly Rae Jepsen

1. Twin Peaks: The Return
2. BNSF
3. Split
4. Apple Pie
5. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
6. EMBARGO
7. Night Moves
8. Everybody Wants Some!!
9. Marriage Story
10. Exhibition

...plus 35 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

asked the great Mike Thorn for a list of hecka disturbing films and am now providing one in return.... so, for whatever reasons, these are the movies the most under my skin on a visceral level

• Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
• Suicide
• Hostel
• The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)
• The Mangler
• Black Mass of the Nazi Sex Wizard
• Inland Empire
• The Evil Within
• The Brown Bunny
• Audition

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

thank u jon and yush and nimish

• The Pornographers
• A Zed & Two Noughts
• Everybody Wants Some!!
• Yuva

Under the paving stones, the grass!

A formalist mythistorian for the ages. Diaz is superficially didactic, but underneath this mode of working is an intense emotionalism borne from the endurance and stamina it takes to survive one of his political treatises. At his best, Diaz shows the world slightly askew, only a touch more benevolent or hellish than in reality. Here is my ranking of his work.

1. Florentina Hubaldo, CTE
2. Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution
3. Storm Children, Book One
4. From What Is Before
5. Heremias: Book One - The Legend of the Lizard Princess
6. Melancholia
7. Century of Birthing
8. Death in the Land of Encantos
9. The Woman Who Left
10. The Day Before the End

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Also
- Netflix's Bojack Horseman
- Amazon Prime's Fleabag

1. Watchmen
2. Marriage Story
3. High Flying Bird
4. Us
5. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
6. Monos
7. Parasite
8. Glass
9. The Lighthouse
10. Under the Silver Lake

SPREADING
THE
LOVE

1. Knives Out
2. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
3. Looper
4. Brick
5. The Brothers Bloom
6. The Life of the World to Come
7. Evil Demon Golfball from Hell!!!
8. Ben Boyer and the Phenomenology of Automobile Marketing
9. The Psychology of Dream Analysis

1. Apple Pie
2. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
3. Everybody Wants Some!!
4. Evening Glow Over
5. Anticipation
6. The Neon Demon
7. Moonlight
8. 20th Century Women
9. Personal Shopper
10. The Demons

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Split
2. Twin Peaks: The Return
3. Nathan for You: Finding Frances
4. Song to Song
5. Call Me by Your Name
6. Paddington 2
7. Logan Lucky
8. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
9. Good Time
10. Gerald's Game

And
Bojack Horseman (Raphael Bob-Waksberg)

1. The Other Side of the Wind
2. The Haunting of Hill House
3. The Image Book
4. Permanent Green Light
5. Unsane
6. The Favourite
7. Hereditary
8. First Man
9. Under the Silver Lake
10. Unfriended: Dark Web

1. The Ice Storm
2. Sense and Sensibility
3. Gemini Man
4. Brokeback Mountain
5. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
6. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
7. Life of Pi
8. Hulk

Inspired by Mike Thorn.

My debut short story, whiteroomyellowface, will be published in SCAB Magazine in March 2019. I have written on-and-off my whole life. whiteroomyellowface will be my first published work. Here is a list of influences on my literary work, and things I reference consistently.

1. Eros + Massacre
2. Permanent Green Light
3. All That Jazz
4. All My Life
5. Presents
6. Down Friday Street
7. The Sequence of Parallel Bars
8. 20th Century Women
9. Call Me by Your Name
10. Night Terrors

...plus 73 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Everyone's favorite least favorite.

1. Hostel
2. Knock Knock
3. Cabin Fever
4. Hostel: Part II
5. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
6. Death Wish
7. The Green Inferno
8. Thanksgiving
9. Stolz der Nation
10. Restaurant Dogs

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Everybody Wants Some!!
2. It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books
3. A Scanner Darkly
4. Before Sunset
5. Bernie
6. Before Midnight
7. Slacker
8. Before Sunrise
9. School of Rock
10. Dazed and Confused

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.