Film posts
I'm currently doing a film challenge:
I've posted film reviews (notes? ramblings?) on and off for years, and I discovered that writing a few paragraphs embedded the film a little more in my memory. I also love the structure of a film challenge. It gets me out of endless scrolling and helps me choose.
Previous film challenges:
November 18 2024, 20:19
Enys Men
A woman in a bright red coat walks the barren landscape of an island somewhere off the coast of Cornwall. She’s a volunteer monitoring wildlife, in particular a clutch of white flowers of which she records the soil temperature at their roots every day. [more...]
August 20 2024, 18:13
The Stendhal Syndrome
Imaginative and clichéd, intriguing and brutal, this film is primarily about rape, torture, and insanity. Asia Argento goes insane in Florence on the trail of a serial killer and rapist. [more...]
August 13 2024, 18:39
The Black Cat/Trauma
These two odd kittens are making me wonder if the Dario Argento project is reaching its end. The Black Cat sees a deranged, beret-clad Harvey Keitel play a photographer obsessed with taking pictures of mutilated bodies. [more...]
July 31 2024, 17:48
Opera
Opera is the last of what’s regarded as Argento’s unimpeachable run of giallo-horror-thrillers through the seventies and eighties. For me, there are hits and misses, but Opera is one of his best. [more...]
July 28 2024, 11:09
Phenomena
Like in Suspiria, a young woman arrives at a female-run school where students are being murdered by an unseen killer, but there are no witches in Zürich, just a girl who has an unconscious connection with insects. [more...]
July 12 2024, 21:45
Tenebre
You see different things in a good piece of art as you get older. I wrote about Tenebre back in October 2020 for the #31DaysofHorror challenge. I loved it then, and I love it now, but the protagonist is far less likeable than I remember, and the twists more surprising. [more...]
July 10 2024, 21:40
Inferno
If Suspiria was a step away from the narrative rigours of a whodunnit, Inferno is a giant leap, with four (four!) protagonists in two cities — but it starts with a woman, Rose, being sold a rare occult book called The Three Mothers and coming to believe her apartment block was built for a witch. [more...]
July 07 2024, 10:35
Suspiria
Suspiria is a vivid, colourful dream where death stalks us, out of sight but ever-present. Characters die in complicated and fantastical ways to Goblin’s driving mix of Moog synths, bells, whispered vocals and a drum beat for the ages. And it’s a film filled with strong women. The men are all ineffectual side characters. [more...]
June 23 2024, 08:11
Deep Red
After making a couple of thrillers for television and a hard-to-find historical comedy that was a commercial flop, Argento returned to Giallo with a twisty, colourful, Goblin-scored mystery. [more...]
June 19 2024, 06:15
Four Flies on Grey Velvet
Roberto, an American drummer in a band recording in Milan, chases a man who has been following him and accidentally kills him. A masked figure takes photographs and begins to torment Roberto, but what is their motive? [more...]
June 16 2024, 10:34
The Cat O’ Nine Tails
A blind ex-journalist overhears a conversation about blackmail outside his apartment. A newspaper reporter investigates a burglary in a nearby laboratory. As people at the lab start to die, the two men join forces to uncover the story. [more...]
June 08 2024, 13:10
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
In Panico, Dario Argento describes himself as being of two halves — the contented person at home, and the person who is compelled to investigate the darkness inside himself through making films. [more...]
April 13 2024, 10:29
Ligeia
Ligeia, by Edgar Allan Poe, is a six-thousand-word hallucinatory tale about an intense marriage that survives beyond death. The narrator is looking back, remembering his wife, Ligeia, who he idolised. [more...]
January 13 2024, 16:01
Nostalgia
I’m in Wales at short notice because Dad’s been admitted into hospital. The co-morbidities have gathered and decided to strike. He’s in bad shape. Around visiting times I’m looking for peaceful, distracting activities. [more...]
January 07 2024, 14:28
Fidelity
I’ve deleted my Patreon creator’s account, which was beginning to feel like I was cheating on my website (or the other way around, I’m not sure). Two places for almost the same words. [more...]
December 30 2023, 21:06
Best film discoveries and fiction of 2023
My favourite ten film discoveries (ranked) and ten favourite fiction books (not ranked). (Letterboxd is a hella sexy website. I wish GoodReads made more of an effort.) [more...]
October 31 2023, 19:21
Halloween (1978)
It has a purity that other slashers don’t have — the crisp cinematography, Laurie’s naive, nerdy charm, the simple (perfect) motif of the score. I can’t fully explain it. [more...]
October 30 2023, 05:40
Enemy (2013)
My favourite discovery of the month. Barely ninety minutes, looks beautiful, has a startling final image, and I’m still thinking about it a day later. [more...]
October 29 2023, 05:36
Cloverfield (2008)
Feeling insignificant in the face of a fictional disaster, whether natural or alien, has its psychological comforts. Sometimes you just want something big to fuck shit up. [more...]
October 28 2023, 06:53
You're Next (2011)
It’s bleak fun with some good twists. Everyone apart from Erin, our survivalist heroine, is awful. Is this where the current trend of violent final girls began? [more...]
October 27 2023, 06:10
Duel (1971)
I watched Duel dozens of time on television as a kid, as well as it’s rip-off cousin The Car, so it was a treat to revisit it. I didn’t remember the crisis of masculinity. [more...]
October 26 2023, 06:10
Return of the Living Dead (1985)
The gang of punks hanging out in the graveyard are everything I wish I’d been as a teen — vibrant, trashy, horny, loud, and sometimes naked in public. [more...]