“Magnolia” is many, many (many) things, but first and foremost it’s a movie about people who are fighting to live above their pain — a theme that not only runs through all nine parts of this story, but also bleeds through Paul Thomas Anderson’s career. There’s John C. Reilly as Officer Jim Kurring, who’s efficiently cast himself as being the hero and narrator of a non-existent cop show in order to give voice to your things he can’t confess. There’s Jimmy Gator, the dying game show host who’s haunted by many of the ways he’s failed his daughter (he’s played from the late Philip Baker Hall in one of the most affectingly human performances you’ll ever see).
“What’s the main difference between a Black person in addition to a n****r?” A landmark noir that hinges on Black identification plus the so-called war on medicines, Bill Duke’s “Deep Cover” wrestles with that provocative concern to bloody ends. It follows an undercover DEA agent, Russell Stevens Jr. (Laurence Fishburne at his complete hottest), as he works to atone to the sins of his father by investigating the cocaine trade in Los Angeles in a bid to bring Latin American kingpins to court.
Even more acutely than both in the films Kieślowski would make next, “Blue” illustrates why none of us is ever truly alone (for better even worse), and then mines a powerful solace from the cosmic thriller of how we might all mesh together.
The terror of “the footage” derived from watching the almost pathologically ambitious Heather (Heather Donahue) begin to deteriorate as she and her and her crew members Josh (Joshua Leonard) and Mike (Michael C. Williams) get lost within the forest. Our disbelief was effectively suppressed by a DYI aesthetic that interspersed minimal-quality video with 16mm testimonials, each giving validity on the nonfiction concept in their have way.
The movie was encouraged by a true story in Iran and stars the actual family members who went through it. Mere days after the news item broke, Makhmalbaf turned her camera about the family and began to record them, directing them to reenact selected scenes depending on a script. The ethical questions raised by such a beeg con technique are complex.
Duqenne’s fiercely established performance drives every body, because the restless young Rosetta takes on challenges that not one person — let alone a baby — should ever have to face, such as securing her next meal or making sure that she and her mother have operating water. Eventually, her learned mistrust of other people leads her to betray the one friend she has in order to steal his occupation. While there’s still the faintest light of humanity left in Rosetta, much of it's got been pounded outside of her; the film opens as she’s being fired from a factory career from which she must be dragged out kicking and screaming, and it ends with her in much the same state.
Seen today, steeped in nostalgia for that freedoms of the pre-handover Hong Kong, “Chungking Express” still feels new. The film’s lasting power is especially impressive inside the face of such a fast-paced world; a world in which nothing could be more valuable than a concrete offer from someone willing to share the same future with you — even if that offer is created on a napkin. —DE
That’s not to say that “Fire Walk with Me” is interchangeable with the show. Working over two hours, the movie’s temper is much grimmer, scarier and — within an unsettling way — sexier than phonerotica Lynch’s foray into broadcast television.
Nearly 30 years later, “Bizarre Days” is actually a tough watch due to onscreen brutality against Black folks and women, and because through today’s cynical eyes we know such footage rarely enacts the alter desired. Even so, Bigelow’s alluring and visually arresting film continues to enrapture because it so perfectly captures the misplaced hope of its time. —RD
It didn’t work out so well to the last girl, but what does Adèle care? The hole in her heart is almost puretaboo as significant because the hole between her teeth, and there isn’t a man alive who’s been in a position to fill it thus far.
Of every one of the things that Paul Verhoeven’s dark comedian look within the future of authoritarian warfare presaged, how that “Starship Troopers” uses its “Would you like to know more?
You might love it for the whip-good screenplay, which received Callie Khouri an Academy Award. Or maybe for your chemistry between its two leads, because Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis couldn’t have been better cast as Louise, a jaded waitress and her friend Thelma, a naive housewife, whose worlds are turned upside down during a weekend girls’ trip when Louise fatally shoots a person trying to rape Thelma outside a dance hall.
Life itself will not be just a romance or even a comedy or free porm an overwhelming due to the fact of “ickiness” or simply a chance to help out just one’s ailing neighbors (By means of a donated bong or what have you), but free vr porn all of those things: That’s a lesson Cher learns throughout her cinematic travails, but one particular that “Clueless” was created to celebrate. That’s always in style. —
We asked for that movies that had them at “hello,” the esoteric picks they’ve never forgotten, the Hollywood monoliths, the international gems, the documentaries that captured time inside of a bottle, and the kind of blockbusters they just don’t make anymore.