to see a picture like this, something so wildly intelligent, crafty and playful, is to fully understand how tepid and timid the current state of things has become.

long live welles, mister mix master magus.

there’s two movies here, one that you can see and one you can only feel. somehow you’re watching the movie they didn't make. what an astonishing thing. unreal.

pretty fun, no?! sweet and affectionate, right?

i don’t need to sit here and thump my thumbs on a phone to announce that here is a perfect movie, a noir with as sharp an edge as any and smarter and slyer than maybe all of its fellows - welles on a different mountain top, the rarefied one on which “they” couldn’t let him remain. “ahhhh… french champagne!” is goddamn right.

a herculean feat cinematic mud and rain and blood and wind and steel and fire. imagining the prep and execution of a picture like this, nearly 50 years ago, makes me feel cold and wet and like i’m only halfway across a threadbare suspension bridge with a stick of dynamite in my sweaty teeth.

a one in a million movie about possessive love that is utterly unconcerned with narrative or explanation, but which is also never boring or unclear. wild, pitch perfect, gorgeous, ugly and human.

any horror movie that starts with the sounds of the sets being built for the horror movie we’re about to watch is okay for me - whatever happened to horror movies that don’t take themselves so seriously?

i went to a retrospective screening of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN hosted by the guy who (literally) wrote the (a) book on the coens movies and in his opening remarks he called A SERIOUS MAN the bros’ “best film” and all i could think in the moment was “oh come on” and, also, at the same time “well, he’s not wrong…”

anyone who’s ever made a movie knows how hard it is to make anything seem spontaneous and alive and fragile - this movie does all of that, all the time, every time, and with zero dishonesty or artifice; gorgeous.