I don’t think I have seen a film so alchemically suited to my tastes as this one. A love letter spanning the past and future of American cinema from Bob Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ernst Lubitsch, Vincente Minnelli and perhaps most indirectly but also the most directly: David Lynch. Those lonely nights as a shared dream world created by the sum of the electric neuroses bouncing between people. What Rudolph achieved here is on its face so simple, but the…

The People’s History of China by way of Zhao Tao’s face. So thankful I saw this again in a theater. In my last blurb about this film, I spoke to how it acts as a formal experiment looking at China’s transition from communism to capitalism like Jia’s other films. Yet none of its polemic qualities come together without its emotional ones. Of course it’s a film about China being stuck in the worsening purgatory of late stage capitalism in the…

What’s the line about old dogs and new tricks? He’s certainly not that old but I think I can officially say we have entered Wes’s late style. Scheme is not a deconstruction of his formalism like Asteroid City and the Dahl shorts but this is still a very different animal from any of Anderson’s previous work. He’s letting politics and religion subtly enter his dollhouses and the emotional releases are definitely present but not presented as loudly as in his…