Movies reviewed this week: Cradle Will Rock, How Green Was My Valley, Alphaville, and Jules and Jim.
Category: Culture
I love copying my Letterboxd reviews over here, but I hate how much they dominate my feed. This week I started rewriting my script so that it’ll batch reviews up a week at a time. Gonna take a little more thought about formatting and such, but I’ve got the basic aggregation working and the output looks like this:
Year: 2022
Week: 9
Polytechnique, 2009 - ★★★★★ (contains spoilers)
Week: 10
Forbidden City, U.S.A., 1989 - ★★★½
The Last Days of Disco, 1998 - ★★½
A Bay of Blood, 1971 - ★★★So that’s cool. This’ll also let me comfortably grab the whole backlog from Letterboxd via their export feature, which I didn’t want to do because a lot of my older reviews (from, say, Fantasia) are one-liners.
Movies reviewed this week: Lola, Blue My Mind, The Tune, and First Love.
Movies reviewed this week: This Sporting Life and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Movies reviewed this week: The King of Marvin Gardens, Three Colors: Red, and Funny Games.
Movies reviewed this week: A Room in Town, Love and Anarchy, and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
Movies reviewed this week: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Purple Noon, Petite Maman, and La Haine.
Movies reviewed this week: The Decameron, Hopscotch, It’s Always Fair Weather, The Sweet Hereafter, The American Soldier, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Movies reviewed this week: The Gleaners and I, The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, Shadow in the Cloud, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.
Saskia Reeves is awfully good in Slow Horses. As with more or less everything in both the original novels and the TV show, it’s a slow reveal. They show us the failures that the Slough House denizens have become, and you have to be patient to see the talents — however rusty — that balance out the failings.
So up front, Catherine Standish is an aging grey haired alcoholic. I’ve just finished episode 5 of the first season, which is where she lifts her head and sees a chance and takes it. The really good bit is when Reeves makes it clear that her character is incredibly pleased to have gotten this one right, with the slightest shy smile.
I won’t spoil the books but I did say that the talents “balance out” the failings, didn’t I? Not “overcome.” Such a good series. I’ve read them and can promise that reading them won’t mar your enjoyment of the TV show.
Episode 5 shows that transition for a few characters, actually, protagonists and antagonists alike. People get serious. It’s a nice inflection point before the season finale, in which much of that seriousness will be at cross purposes.