It’s been a while since I published a compendium of Letterboxd reviews so, of course, here are two at once. In the past couple of years, I’ve been writing more and more on Letterboxd, Mostly just brief snippets and short texts, but I like them all, however small, however fragmented they may be, and I’m keen to keep a record of them here. So here we go. Part two of a bumper crop. In case you missed it, here's part one. The texts in this post were written between September 2024 and February 2025, and are presented in alphabetical order. I hope you enjoy reading them.
Bad Day at Black Rock | John Sturges, 1955
A nation scarred by war: the men who fight come back with a pain that drives compassion; the men who can't are left with nothing but hate and anger, and nowhere to aim but home. Flowers grow through the dust of the desert from unmarked graves, but nobody picks them. There's no place for beauty in Black Rock, but there can be. A film about rebuilding America by rooting out the darkness. The flowers are there, it's just a matter of finding them.
The Conformist | Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970
A man trying again and again to assimilate into whichever crowd will have him, only he doesn't fit anywhere, never able to flow with the currents of anything beyond self-preservation and stuck in a spiral of people dancing around him, enjoying a rhythm he can't find. A spare part of a man at best, and, when it comes down to it, an impotent one. Lacerating in its depiction of how fascism serves as the most appealing shortcut to power for worthless men like this, men who crave a feeling of importance without having to do anything to earn it. Men who have meetings in large offices in marble buildings, their voices reverberating loudly to no one. It's so easy to sound important in a cavernously empty room.
Cloud | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024
An online world of slippery motivations and directionless anger brought into reality by the shattering of the illusion of anonymity. A lack of culpability dragging everyone closer to hell. Kurosawa fills it with frosted glass, dirty polythene, tattered curtains; obscured windows into other worlds. Usernames and aliases, lies and scams. The shift to violence comes when the fog clears and the masks slip, and one true fact brings the whole thing down. All that's left is a void of money where love used to be, and the only thing that sparks a smile is a symbol on a screen changing from "for sale" to "sold".
Golem | Piotr Szulkin, 1979
Shadows and blindness, and a total lack of information. A fake man's desire to understand a world in which everyone knows more than he does, as he's pushed deeper into a maze by the lure of learning something. Fix this watch, carry this oven, poison those birds. But no questions, just demands. No choices, no alternatives. A lot of narrow staircases, thin corridors, grey concrete streets. One path laid out for him. Blunt, bleak, crushing. Everyone has cataracts but the eye doctor is dead.
Hard Truths | Mike Leigh, 2024
Leigh has always had a thing about potted plants, and flowers in vases, and here they are again. Life without life, separated from nature and reliant on human care and attention. A big, empty house, all light but no air, and no decoration. Just sanitised surfaces and people tiptoeing between them, scared to leave a mark or make a sound. Everyone exists in the orbit of Pansy (another flower). Her defeated husband, who fixes radiators in other people’s homes, and her son, always wearing headphones, who wants to fly. Elsewhere, her sister and her nieces are always warm, always out in the world, enjoying life. For Leigh, it’s impossible to be happy without letting life in. When Moses buys his mother flowers, she anxiously puts them in a vase, only for Curtley to throw them into the overgrown garden when she leaves the room. This home is no place for flowers. And so it goes on.
In The Wake | Takahisa Zeze, 2021
A police procedural, with a murder investigation framed as a search for justice of a different kind. Zeze spends very little time on the police work, focusing instead on building all these characters from the horrors of the 2011 tsunami, and the pain they have had to endure in the nine years after. Everyone has lost something, and so everyone understands the impulses that drive such murders. Choices in context, and Zeze exhaustively draws that context for everyone involved. A bit too contrived in its linking of all these people, but an immensely powerful study of corruption and inhumanity all the same — visualised beautifully by the fully dressed but faceless mannequin decorating the office of a politician running for office on a ticket of welfare reform.
Pale Flower | Masahiro Shinoda, 1964
Blank faces, slumped shoulders. Life as a succession of larger and larger bets, and searching for thrills within the rigid systems and protocols of high-stakes card games and yakuza turf wars. A film about playing games to feel alive, and playing with nothing to lose. Prison is just time spent somewhere else. Financial losses mean nothing. And so everyone hurtles towards oblivion, trying to feel something in the process before there's nothing left to feel.
Rancho Notorious | Fritz Lang, 1952
A quest for revenge borne from tragedy. A film that opens with a kiss and ends with a death, all loaded with emotion, but Lang muddies the waters by having it all play out under the fake skies of a different kind of world. Corrupt politicians held in custody on election day by the men set to take their place. A rigged game in a makeshift casino designed to make winners feel lucky. Everything is predetermined. Even this man's revenge becomes an obligation, something that he will achieve simply because he has nothing else to do but achieve it. And so the seasons pass. Summer comes round again and the chase continues in perpetuity. He thinks he's acting out of love but that's long since rotted away. He can only gesture towards it, faking and weaponising it as he moves further and further away from the man he used to be. His only propulsion is revenge. And once that's gone, there's nowhere left to go.
Suzhou River | Lou Ye, 2000
Stories as mythical creatures, their allure stemming from an unquashable mystery. Mermaids probably aren't real, but maybe they are. Maybe doppelgängers are, too. A wounded man tells a story of lost love, first through his own eyes, and then through someone else's. Imagined events, told perhaps as self-deception, perhaps as a way to make a painful reality less banal, or perhaps because this is how things really happened. It’s impossible to know anything with certainty. A glimpse of a mermaid in a muddy river, flowing endlessly past the shells of derelict buildings and seen through the imprecise lens of a handheld camera. Everything is true and nothing is. All there is to do is find a glimmer of something to hold on to in the mystery. And isn’t that why we tell stories?
Tausend Augen | Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, 1984
Surveillance and voyeurism as routes to hell, numbing all feeling from life and pushing people towards a catatonic pursuit of money but nothing to spend it on. Only engaging with the world with curiosity brings happiness, be it watching movies or sketching people or going to zoos or dancing. Also features Jean-Marie Straub delivering a lecture on marine biology, and Wim Wenders stealing a VHS copy of Dr Mabuse the Gambler from a video store. A truly alien object.