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Scott Reviews Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs [Criterion Blu-ray Review]

As the art film revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s gave way to more populist manifestations of its stylistic inventions, so too did the “foreign language drama” become a codified form. As Bergman,...

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Scott Reviews Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park [Masters of Cinema...

Robert Altman builds his films like dystopian prisons, convincing his residents they have the run of the place while working to ensure they can’t escape. When he actually buckles down for a...

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Scott Reviews Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming [Masters of Cinema...

There’s a sense I get from a lot of late-1970s American films that following the hope of the early 1960s, the anger of the late 1960s, and the despondency of the early 1970s, a lot of people felt that...

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Scott’s TCM Fest Dispatch, Part One: Silliness

This is my seventh TCM Classic Film Festival. At a certain point, some things become routine – one learns to expect the exhaustion at the dawn of day three (of four), the constant negotiation between...

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Scott’s TCM Fest Dispatch, Part Two: Economics

The 1930s – more films about women, more films about working life. And often the two overlapped. You watch a film made today, it’s brutally clear that the people who made it rarely have to be anywhere...

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Scott Reviews James Gray’s The Lost City of Z [Theatrical Review]

James Gray has a habit of digging up the past. Usually he does it by way of resuscitating unfashionable directorial techniques, genres, and aesthetics, but in The Lost City of Z, he’s found a subject...

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Scott’s TCM Fest Dispatch, Part Three: Psychology

It’s not exactly remarkable that cinema has been around long enough to chart the rise of modern psychology. The first century of film covers society’s entire 20th, a hundred-year span rife with...

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Scott Reviews Juzo Itami’s Tampopo [Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review]

Wikipedia suggests the term “food porn” was coined by feminist critic Rosalind Coward in her 1984 book Female Desire, one year before the film to which it is still best applicable was released. Juzo...

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Scott Reviews Charles Vidor’s Cover Girl [Masters of Cinema Blu-ray Review]

How did a film like Cover Girl slip away? When it was shown at the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2012, it was considered something of a discovery, with Robert Osborne frequently singling it out in...

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Scott Reviews Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080...

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a thriller. It’s as claustrophobic, psychologically penetrating, and exactingly-directed an apartment film as anything Roman Polanski has made....

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Scott Reviews Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu [Criterion Blu-ray Review]

Anytime I watch Mizoguchi’s work…really any of it, but especially from this later period of his career – which includes The Crucified Lovers, Sansho the Bailiff, The Life of Oharu, and The Woman in...

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Scott Reviews Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Daughter of the Nile [Masters of Cinema...

Hou Hsiao-hsien is best known and most acclaimed for historical dramas like A City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, Flowers of Shanghai, and The Assassin, but a much more persistent subject for him has...

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Scott Reviews Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker [Criterion Blu-ray Review]

I have seen every Tarkovsky film, and there is little doubt in my mind they gain infinitely in a theater, where the scope and beauty of them can be most fully appreciated. His wide, glacial shots are...

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Scott Reviews Luchino Visconti’s Conversation Piece [Masters of Cinema...

We all, on some level, regret aging because we fear dying, but there’s something especially poignant about watching artists who celebrated vitality grapple with their mortality. It’s one thing to...

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Scott Reviews Ronald Neame’s Hopscotch [Criterion Blu-ray Review]

Hey, you might not be aware of this – and honestly, no worries if not, we’ve all got a lot going on – but Hopscotch is the greatest movie ever. This is an irrefutable fact, and I’m glad I was able to...

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Scott Reviews Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky [Theatrical Review]

Given that it’s his first feature film in the four years – a comparatively standard break for most other filmmakers – since the prolific Steven Soderbergh announced he would make no more, Logan Lucky...

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Scott Reviews Josef von Sternberg’s The Saga of Anatahan [Masters of Cinema...

Film culture moves awfully fast sometimes. I had never even heard of The Saga of Anatahan when the New Beverly here in Los Angeles showed it (under the title Ana-ta-han) about a year and a half ago on...

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Scott Reviews Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Woman [Criterion Blu-ray Review]

Kelly Reichardt’s triptych film Certain Women is adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy, and retains the feeling the form is so effective at evoking. Spare on plot, they isolate moments from...

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Scott Reviews Ruben Östlund’s The Square [Theatrical Review]

It would perhaps be too far to say all films with a polemic angle deal in loneliness, but neither too does it seem completely off base. I’ve been on a bit of a Godard kick this year, especially the...

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Scott Reviews Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper [Criterion Collection...

Cinema’s disconnect from the mainstream culture isn’t precisely anything against the quality of the movies. Relatively speaking, when I look over the list of 109 films from this year I’ve seen, in...

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Scott Reviews Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying [Theatrical Review]

Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail is one of the greatest films ever made. Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying, its quasi-sequel, won’t rank among the best of the year. But don’t let that get in your way....

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Episode 188 – Monte Hellman’s The Shooting & Ride in the Whirlwind

This time on the podcast, Scott is joined by David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett to discuss Monte Hellman’s The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. In the midsixties, the maverick American director...

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Scott Reviews Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread [Theatrical Review]

I’ve maintained what I consider to be a healthy distrust of my past self, which is to say, while I maintain many of the same interests throughout my life, I tend to look skeptically on what...

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Scott Reviews Wash Westmoreland’s Colette [Sundance 2018]

About a quarter of the way through the film that shares her name, Colette (played by Keira Knightley) sits down to write what I gather became quite a famous opening line – “My name is Claudine, I live...

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Scott Reviews Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot [Sundance...

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot is the first film Gus Van Sant has written since 2007’s Paranoid Park capped off an all-time great run of films, leading to decidedly less-successful, though no...

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Scott Reviews Paul Dano’s Wildlife [Sundance 2018]

The prestige debut film is cornerstone of the modern art house market, and thus a persistent presence at Sundance. They are beautifully (almost too-cleanly) photographed, ostentatiously performed,...

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Scott Reviews Panos Costmatos’s Mandy [Sundance 2018]

Panos Cosmatos made quite a splash back in 2010 with Beyond the Black Rainbow, a ponderous sci-fi horror film that he quite accurately described as a sort of adaptation of the film you’d imagine when...

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Scott Reviews Jim Hosking’s An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn [Sundance 2018]

The anti-comedy movement hasn’t exactly been my cup of tea; too often am I bored by the joke of the non-joke, the deadpan in need of burial, the non-sequitur that ultimately just ends. Jim Hosking’s...

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Scott Reviews Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post [Sundance 2018]

Let’s begin with a basic premise on which we can all, I hope, agree – Christian camps that try to “reprogram” gay kids are flat-out awful, and can be quite reasonably called evil. They are also,...

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Scott Reviews Sally Potter’s The Party [Theatrical Review]

A party has many connotations, at least two of which – a festive gathering and a political organization – are the direct subjects of Sally Potter’s new film. Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) is throwing a...

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Scott Reviews Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience [Theatrical Review]

What is free will, really, and what is freedom? We say we live in a free country, a free society, and every year that society grows more and more accepting of freedoms that would have been heavily,...

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TCM Fest 2018: The Big Lebowski’s 20th Anniversary

I first saw Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski when I was a sophomore in high school, on the recommendation of some stoner upperclassmen. Now, I’ve never been cool, but for some reason, pot movies...

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TCM Fest 2018: Work, Sex, and Everything In Between

As much as I’m not a “movies were better back when” type of guy, the regularity with which I return to the theme of work in recapping the TCM Classic Film Festival should make clear that movies “back...

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Scott Reviews Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout...

There is a moment – near the end, so I will not specify – in Mission: Impossible – Fallout during which I genuinely could not believe my eyes. I took in the information onscreen, registered to some...

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Scott Reviews Wash Westmoreland’s Colette [Theatrical Review]

The costume drama, once an ostentatious bid for import in a cash-ready market, has fallen somewhat on hard times, relegating those still intent on exploring it chasing after what little money and...

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Scott Reviews Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War [Theatrical Review]

Cold War begins in 1949, and though in its brief 85 minutes it will cover nearly twenty years of personal and European history, in some ways it will remain there. Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and his...

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Scott Reviews Luciano Ercoli’s The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion...

Giallo burned bright and fast, when the Italian film industry churned out all manner of violence quickly, cheaply, and beautifully. But the genre it is sold as today wasn’t established immediately. It...

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Scott Reviews Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [Criterion...

Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) needs an abortion, but in 1987 Romania, it’s illegal. She’s not terribly resourceful herself; perhaps consequently, she’s not our protagonist. That role falls instead to her...

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Episode 197 – Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly

This time on the podcast, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, Trevor Berrett, and Arik Devens discuss Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly. While vacationing on a remote island retreat, a family’s fragile...

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Scott Reviews Henri-George Clouzot’s La verite [Criterion Blu-ray Review]

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La vérité is, on its surface, a courtroom drama that puts a young woman on trial murdering her lover. Clouzot had spent his career in the mystery genre, honing it for French...

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A Look Ahead at the 10th TCM Classic Film Festival

‘Tis a longstanding tradition amongst TCM Fest preview pieces to do so in the form of posting your own schedule, by way of announcing one’s predilections and priorities while nodding to the...

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TCM Fest 2019: Pre-Code

This is probably a hugely reductive statement, but most of the “pre-Code” Hollywood films I’ve watched – that is, those made after the advent of synchronized sound and before the moral standards of...

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TCM Fest 2019: Those Damn Nazis

“We didn’t know what the National Socialism was, really,” Kevin Brownlow recounted as part of his introduction to his incredible 1965 film It Happened Here. He spoke about how, as young people coming...

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TCM Fest 2019: Sign O’ the Times

“Every film is a documentary of its own making.” Jacques Rivette wrote that, and his films embraced that conviction. And it’s one I’ve largely found to be true, at least in most any film that’s any...

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Episode 199 – Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light

This time on the podcast, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, Trevor Berrett, and Arik Devens discuss Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light. “God, why hast thou forsaken me?” With Winter Light, Ingmar Bergman...

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Episode 200 – Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence

This time on the podcast, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, Trevor Berrett, and Arik Devens discuss Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence. Two sisters—the sickly, intellectual Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and the sensual,...

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Scott Reviews Luigi Bazzoni’s The Fifth Cord [Arrow Blu-ray Review]

In his commentary track for this release, film critic Travis Crawford cautions himself against making any sort of superlatives in saying that Luigi Bazzoni’s The Fifth Cord is one of the best giallo...

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Scott Reviews Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction [Theatrical Review]

With each of the six films he’s made over the past eleven years, writer/director Olivier Assayas is almost singularly focused on the effect of change. His characters long to belong to an earlier era,...

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Episode 205 – Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City

This time on the podcast, Jordan Essoe, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Arik Devens discuss Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City. This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the...

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Episode 212 – Criterion Collection Favorites of 2020

To celebrate The Criterion Collection’s 2019 releases – and there’s a lot to celebrate – Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, Trevor Berrett, Aaron West, and Jordan Essoe gather to talk about the past year in...

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