This documentary is utterly fascinating from tip to tail. It just covers so much ground. Holy crap.

It draws from so many stories, & it presents its thesis so simply and consistently. People who we (North Americans) were raised to believe were the great villains of the 20th century (specifically Khrushchev & Malcolm X) come off as the ones who actually knew what they were doing in this whole mess, and were more or less honest about what they were looking to…

This character study is a masterpiece of precision. No frame, spoken line, or hand movement is wasted. Even the emotional outbursts, such as they are, are kept low in service of the greater portrait. Casting a first-time actor in the main role, putting him in poorly-fitting clothes, shooting him dead-eyed and voice-overed in monotone, takes a bit of getting used to, but it's all part of the greater picture, as smoky and crowded as it is.

To my mind, Pickpocket…

As much as anything, this is a love letter to New York City; it felt full of little easter eggs only people who live in NYC would get, and the plot reminded me enough of "The Warriors" that I was able to relax and watch it on those terms.

This is as frenetic and eye-burning a movie as you'll ever see, and yet it's achingly beautiful in parts. I wept openly multiple times as Miles Morales found connection with people…

Literally every 30 seconds, for the entire run of this movie, there was a moment where something completely bonkers happened that made you rethink everything that came before. This film is the alpha & omega of cinema in 92 incestuous, mistaken identity-packed, irredeemably insane minutes. When the all-nude WWII gas chamber sequence is just dropped in in the middle, honestly I just kinda thought, oh, hell, why not.

There's murderers bumping into other murderers while the murdering is still happening, everyone…

I gotta say, I was skeptical about this -- a movie about a whorehouse in the final days of pre-enlightenment Paris, directed by a cis het white French guy, is gonna be cringey and male-gazey. And it is.

But there is a warmth and (some) empathy at its core. The story tries to center the camaraderie between the women, and the anachronisms ("Nights In White Satin" is well-placed, and the final shot, set a hundred years in the future, is…

I don’t know if I can do this movie justice.

It’s not that this isn’t a movie about WWII, or the injustices served upon children during wartime, or the significant, if limited, power of friendship, or how a constant threat from the outside world can create a bunker mentality, especially among children who are just learning about how it all works, or how small moments of empathy can bring light into the world, even where it is most dark.

It’s…

It's rare to see a silent melodrama paced so evenly and patiently. Chaplin frames a lot of shots in ways that are rather ahead of his time, which gives Edna Purviance (and the rest of the cast) lots of room to be more real in the context of the story. It feels ... more contemporary.

Special shoutout to Young Jeremy Irons as the tortured artist, and Flapper Parker Posey as the catty best friend.

(One plot question: How did Marie…

What does a documentarian owe to their subject?

It took them half a century to make right the promise of the original filmmakers to chronicle the lives & rituals of the Kuna, an indigenous tribe in modern-day Panama, but even through the decades of inaction, of decaying film and bureaucratic snags, this film is more optimistic than it is frustrating.

Seeing the original (dated, 1970s-style) documentary footage, watching the people we come to know in the present day react to their…