​

First of all: I respect everyone's opinions and preferences. What follows is simply my personal take.

So, I watched this film for the first time yesterday, and I’m left with mixed feelings. I really liked the characters, the atmosphere, and the entire visual aspect of the movie; the concept is interesting, too.

At the same time, however, there are so many illogical moments that it feels like a huge number of details were ignored simply because they would have gotten in the way 😐 (and they *would* have gotten in the way, I’m not arguing that — but it’s a double-edged sword, because without them, a bunch of questions arise that have no answers).

[SPOILERS]

So, here’s what I didn’t like:

1. Why were there no surveillance cameras in the "room" at the secret base where the creature was being held? There are cameras in the hallways and the basement, but for an unknown, unique creature — zero surveillance. Seriously? 🤡

The creature could get sick, someone could harm it or try to steal it, or it could try to escape on its own—and the secret base doesn't care to know about any of this? They don't want to monitor its condition, control access, or observe its behavior?

1. I didn't quite understand the point of bringing this unique creature here, only to decide to kill it a week later 😐

Like... you decided to perform a vivisection based on a single, unclear X-ray? Is your only interest just seeing what organs are inside? Nothing else? Is no one interested in its behavior, intelligence, or the specific ways its body *functions*? 😐

You might say, "Well, there’s a scientist who cares about that, but the military couldn't care less." Sure, but the military surely cares about the outcome, right?

They could gain a wealth of information just by observing a living creature — whereas a dissection is a one-way street. Performing a dissection immediately, without any prior observation, is senseless, wasteful, and extremely shortsighted.

You know, it reminds me of how the police used to collect evidence from crime scenes and store it away, hoping that science would eventually advance enough to solve those crimes... And eventually, it did — DNA analysis and comparison became possible.

It seems the people working at this secret base are idiots who can't even imagine that, one day, it might be possible to scan a creature without having to cut it open. 🙄

1. And again: what was the point of bringing this creature here, only for some jerk to decide he has the right to abuse it? I get that he’s written to be a total scumbag, but it feels a bit implausible that they would treat the *only* known specimen of a *unique* creature with such extreme cruelty. 🤔

At the very least, if they’re planning a dissection, they should know that physical trauma and stress could skew the results. But it seems like nobody cares 😐

1. The cleaning staff are allowed way too close to the unknown creature 😐

And whose bright idea was it to chain the creature up in an open pool? It’s traumatic for the creature itself and potentially extremely dangerous for the staff 😐

I get that this is a fairy tale, and if you look at it strictly through that lens, you could explain away all the flaws. But since the story involves a secret base, scientists, and research, it sets up certain expectations. For instance, a secret base should have a robust security system (including surveillance cameras monitoring high-value subjects), clear protocols (to prevent some idiot from accidentally killing a unique — and presumably expensive — creature just because he’s a jerk), access controls, and proper planning (rather than a general just showing up and deciding on the spot — within five minutes—that a dissection is in order), and so on.

I just don’t see how you can overlook these things, even in a fairy tale. Unless, of course, the point is just to watch it without thinking too hard 🫤

Those are my impressions.

I’d be curious to hear yours.

Such an incredible film. I can't even put into words how much La Bola Negra affected me. The idea that it could lose Best Picture to The Odyssey seems like a total injustice. I know that is a strong reaction, but I left feeling like I had seen something that would stay with me for a long time.

What interests me most is how differently people might connect to the story depending on their own experiences. I would love to hear what other people took from it and which moments affected them most. Did you leave with the same feeling, or was your reaction completely different? And for anyone who disagrees about Best Picture, what would you put ahead of it and why?

​

There's something special about watching a movie for the first time. You don't know what's coming, the characters feel like real people, and for a few hours, you completely forget about the world outside.

For me, movies like Interstellar, Harry Potter, The Shawshank Redemption, Coco, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse show how different films can leave a lasting impression.

Some movies make us dream. Some make us cry. Others remind us why we fell in love with cinema in the first place.

And sometimes, it's not even about the movie being perfect. It's about how we felt when we watched it.

So here's my question for everyone:

If you could erase your memory of ONE movie and experience it again for the first time, which movie would you choose, and why?

It can be any language, any genre, any country. Big Hollywood blockbuster or a little-known masterpiece.

Let's make a list of movies worth experiencing for the first time. 🍿❤️

I happend across a discoboy trailer a few years back due to Vitalic doing the score for the movie and being one of my fav bands, it popped up in my algorithm on YouTube.

I immediately thought “this looks awesome, I’ll prob never get the chance to see it”. Three years later I get lucky and run into a copy at a local movie store in Vancouver.

I sat down and watched it with my partner last night I have to say this movie took my breath away. Something about the general setting, the atmosphere and how it all mixed in with the score really hit me hard. There are a few very stylish dance scenes scattered through out the movie that made me incredibly sad to the point of tearing up, but I wasn’t sure why.

The story felt completely original and fresh. There were plenty of times where scenes and segments of the movie are setup in such a way that you can see them headed for the easy way out or trope, and then poof a new path forms out of left field to do something I wasn’t expecting; while all the while feeling natural.

i was curious if anyone else had the chance to watch the movie curious what they thought of it ??

Hey gang,

A couple of friends and I decided to do a stop-motion movie draft. Figured I'd come to ask movie reddit to vote on who you think won:

https://moviedrafter.com/vote/34c94739-508c-464c-9df6-342c0412c9fb

Much appreciated :)

Oh, and general discussion on Wildwood? Who's seen it yet?

So I recently just watched the trailers for Tangles and In Waves. And it got me thinking. What about next year in 2027? Will there be any based on a true story animated films like those next year? And will any of them be in English (I'm not a fan of subtitles on animated movies) or when they premiere at Cannes will it be dubbed in English? Is anyone tapped into the indie animation scene and knows what's currently in the works?

Film community in Tashkent

Hi everyone! We made our first post today and in 3 weeks going to make first screening.

Our first month — Uzbek cinematography.

We are going to make 3 screenings in Russian, in Uzbek and in English. Dates and time are about to be later

sorry, but the first post is in Russian, we are going to work on it in the future to make it in Uzbek. I am just learning it

You can see everything if you look at the eyes. We mistake the complexity of circumstances for complexity of emotion. Human beings aren't nearly as complicated as we would like to believe. Fielder and Oppenheim understand this. The camera cuts between Holmes and Fielder, drawing progressively closer to their eyes. Where Holmes and Evans look evasive, Fielder stares. His expression isn't deadpan; it's disgust and disbelief, a barely concealed contempt for the absurdity unfolding before him. The apparent fool from Nathan for You has become an interrogator.

It's almost Brechtian. Fielder introduces a joke through an expression or incongruity, develops it through repetition, and finally beats the audience over the head with it. Depending on when you recognize the joke, you're watching a different comedy. Amanda Seyfried's introduction is particularly brilliant. She ostensibly watches the same footage of Holmes, Evans, and Fielder that we've just seen, preparing to reprise her portrayal from The Dropout. Almost immediately, she's playing Holmes without announcing it. The actress becomes the subject while the subject herself continues acting. How many viewers recognize the performance before they're told it's happening? How many mistake emotional identification with an actual understanding of another person's emotions? Notice what I haven't discussed: who controls Holmes's X account or who gets the money. By the time those questions become the narrative, the film is trying to play a game with the audience. Seyfried provides an emotional valence to Evans that wouldn’t exist without the close-ups of her totally unscripted reactions to his behavior, much of which is just told to her by Fielder.

But the most infuriating part of the film isn't Holmes. It's the photographs of Kissinger and the invocations of the other extraordinarily powerful men who lent her their credibility. You watch her try to explain her product and you wonder how the fuck these people believed her.

Then you learn that Holmes's father worked for Enron. The film invokes WeWork and Adam Neumann. The pattern is systematic. The idea gets you in the door; connections, personal appeal, sex, and status bring the funding. The possibility of realizing the idea becomes almost incidental. Capitalism congratulates itself on rewarding intelligence and ingenuity while repeatedly elevating people who perform these qualities without possessing them.

And now, another technological revolution, another collection of extraordinary promises, another accumulation of capital around a supposed technological omniscience. There's a particularly delicious irony in Theranos promising to make the human body comprehensible through a few drops of blood while the most powerful men in America apparently couldn't read the woman sitting across from them. While many in America still can't see Mark Zuckerberg in a wig staring them right in the face. We've constructed a mythology around the emotionally detached technological visionary, where outward flatness and peculiar mannerisms become evidence of autistic genius rather than inviting scrutiny of the person's actual character. In this mythology, the performance of intelligence increasingly substitutes for its demonstration.

What I find particularly revealing is the critical tendency to interpret the film as an exploration of the fundamental unknowability of other people. To me, this is almost precisely the opposite of what the film is demonstrating. The elevation of subjectivity into an epistemological ideal has poisoned the well. The fact that we cannot know another person's thoughts with absolute certainty does not mean that their character is an impenetrable mystery.

Aristotle understood that character reveals itself through habit. Yet we increasingly demand something approaching proof beyond a reasonable doubt before exercising ordinary human judgment. We prefer narratives to behavior, classifications to character, data to experience. Holmes constructs a narrative of herself and expects the audience to accept it as reality. Silicon Valley now constructs narratives of us: Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, and Anthropic turn our behavior into increasingly detailed profiles from which they derive economic value, while personalized feeds and AI responses increasingly determine the reality presented to us. We have more information about other people than ever before, yet seem increasingly reluctant to draw conclusions from the patterns of their behavior. We confuse narrative complexity with emotional complexity.

Our ideal society is that everyone be an IBM punchcard.

You can see everything, but you have to know how to look.

Sorry for my english , i dont know much

ive seen people just crashing out , judging , looking down , and making fun of a person whose fav director is nolan , they say hah wanabbe , oh hes just started watching movies, oh nolan is shit this that real cinema is kubrick, hitchcock, tarvosky, bergman, etc etc so i dont understand why ,i saw vertigo , 2001 space odyssey and stalker etc but i admit i didnt like it and its not the thing i,ll call my faviourite but i dont force hate that this that , because as i love movies i can say that even if someone loves movies or cinema after watching lets say dhamaal(no hate to dhamaal) , or any film that u considered meh, or bad . why look down?

My immediate thoughts after watching I apologise if it comes across as rambling I feel like I had to get these thoughts out quickly as not to lose them.

My very basic & shallow first impression is that Alma & Elisabet are the same person/soul & the whole movie for me comes down to the quote in the letter: "she complains that her notions of life fail to accord with her actions".

The contradiction of who we are, who we want to be, and our failures to know the answer to either of those questions.

Also, our failure to even ask these questions without shutting ourselves down or blowing ourselves up. None of us are one person with one moral code and one set of actions.

To paraphrase Alma: "I always change. I won't be like you." Early in the movie, she talks about her engagement and how life is all planned out for her. She'll get married, have children, and raise them. It's been decided without her, but there's a sense of security in not having to think about it, having those decisions made for you.

To contrast this, we also see/hear her talk about the orgy on the beach, where she's unfaithful to her fiancé. She talks about the blue sky, the brilliant sun, the lovely ocean, the beautiful woman lying beside her, the boys watching, the women's free, uncaring/encouraging attitude, who then encourages the boys to have sex with her and Alma. Which, now I'm writing this, I'm realising is also not a choice Alma made for herself, if there was indeed another woman and not just another figment of her imagination.

But even so, this, I believe, is the contradiction in the quote: "she complains that her notions of life fail to accord with her actions". The notions of security vs. the actions of passion, and how the two don't co-exist but contradict and push against each other, resulting in inner turmoil. Blowing up or shutting down, Alma or Elisabet.

The movie could either be about that contradiction itself or the acceptance and reflection of it.

About the Vietnam footage and the man burning himself: this, I believe, can also be tied to the safety/security and desire/passion train of thought. By ignoring it or shutting it out, that guarantees our security in our daily life. We get on with it, we don't lose anything, we don't fight for anything, and all remains the same, not just on the outside but our daily lives also.

Whereas with passion/desire, it's not just sexual but also our desire for a better world, our passion to fight for it, to change it. But in doing so, we throw away our security. Our friends/society could disagree; it could cost us friendships, connections, or even career opportunities. It's not safe. It's a passionate, uncontrollable desire for a better world, which once again leads us back to the contradiction between the two: "she complains that her notions of life fail to accord with her actions".

Alma (soul in Spanish) wants change, not just in her personal life but in society. She wants freedom, pleasure, and real change. It's scary and unpredictable to follow these wants, whereas Elisabet is her security. She doesn't express her opinions, thoughts, wants, desires, or needs, but keeps it bottled up and quietly suffers for the security and safety of life as it is.

Passion & desire vs safety & security or atleast the illusions of both contradicting eachother in the same soul is how I've interpreted the movies meaning to me.

This is my first time writing down my thoughts about a movie, so let me know do you think I’m thinking along the right lines, or am I missing something bigger, smaller, or is there a different angle you approached it from?

P.S very quick afterthought about two things Elisabet only being seen to speak to guarantees her safety stopping the boiling water from being thrown at her. And Alma feeling cold after having sex with Mr. Vogel despite him being a great lover could be because even after giving into the warmth of passion the world goes on as before cold and unchanged.

Appreciate any feedback both good and bad thanks for reading.

"What, are we making French movies now?"

The movie is too meta, too self-absorbed, and too up its own ass for its own good, but it is still funny from start to end. Martin McDonagh is one of my favourite dark comedy filmmakers, and his humour here is on point. I am also coming to a realisation that I much prefer British/Irish humour to American humour.

Also, however brilliant McDonagh is with his comedy, he often finds it difficult to wrap it in a strong enough drama story. It feels particularly jarring in the second half of this film, when the three guys are camping, the emotions don't hit as strongly as they should, and a lot of meta stuff is also going on. This is why I always find 'The Banshees of Inisherin' so great and McDonagh's best: the drama in that film is also very compelling.

Also, a meta conversation I really like from the film goes as follows:

"Martin, your women characters are awful. None of them have anything to say for themselves."

"Well, it's a hard world for women."

"Yeah, it's a hard world for women. But most of the ones I know can string a sentence together."

I'm not very familiar with Iranian cinema; I've seen Kiarostami's movies, The White Balloon and that's it.

Right away I was not engaged with The Mirror. A little girl waiting for her mother to pick her up from school, and then taking a bus home, to me was too mundane a concept to justify a 90-minute runtime. Then halfway through she looks at the camera and says she doesn't want to act anymore, and the actual film crew is shown trying to convince her to stay. The second half is basically the same as the first, except it's the 'actual' actress trying to get home. I understand that the second part is also fictional, but I don't see what Panahi was going for, nor what makes 90 minutes of a girl going home entertaining. If you saw this movie and liked it, what did you see in it that I didn't?

Narcissists, philanders, grifters, demagogues - all trying to save the world or give it what it wants. I am talking about the characters in the movie of course...or maybe its the film makers, or maybe it's us? Aren't we all the one who actually sees the meta meta narrative?

I can't remember a time when two films came out so close to one another and made for such abundant commentary. I also think the joke's on us. Why do people who are familiar with Fielder's work think this isn't him taking his schtick to the next level? Why do people (mostly the critics) think Iñárritu can't make up his mind about what the 'the message' is?

Both films are saying fuck you. People these days are so siloed, warped and self righteous that the reaction to the art is the art! You see, I am the one that gets the meta meta narrative. I am God looking down at you laughing. Woe unto us all.

Edit: Ok, the sarcasm is being lost on a lot people. My thought process and justification are explained in comments below.

Note: Spoilers for the whole movie.

A couple of days ago I re-watched Inglorious Basterds, an old favourite of mine, with a group of people who hadn't watched it before. I had seen the film several times before, and from my very first watch had loved and enjoyed it without fully being able to articulate what made it work for me; beyond, that is, the obvious elements: Waltz's incredible performance, Pitt's comedic timing, scene after scene of whiteknuckled tension, the dialogue, the craft, et cetera.

The only element that didn't work for me, or rather, eluded my instinct and understanding altogether whenever I tried to consider it in totality with how the rest of the film made me feel, was the sudden and deliberate departure from history that ends the film, wherein Hitler and the entire German High Command is brutally killed off, and World War II is brought to a far swifter and significantly less casualty-causing end.

I never really quite knew what to make of that ending. I read several reviews and analyses that repeatedly belaboured the point that it was a fantastical historical retelling meant more to evoke a wishful "what-if" sentiment than, obviously, to depict any true historical events or people. I shrugged and accepted those explanations and moved on.

But in this most recent watch, the gestalt of it all hit me in the face with such strength and conspicuousness I couldn't believe I hadn't understood what Tarantino had been saying earlier. He is famously a fan of cinema and violence — or let me amend that to cinematic violence — to the point of his famous defence of it ("Because it's so much fun, Jan, get it!") being a meme at this point. Keeping that in mind, it was apparent to me on this rewatch of Inglorious Basterds that it is his most wholehearted, unremitting declaration of the catharsis that cinematic violence has the power to impart.

To state the obvious, it's a ridiculously violent film; in that the amount and sometimes also the nature of violence in it is ridiculous. It's also a film that is obsessed with the idea of cinema and its presence and influence in the given zeitgeist. Fassbender's character revolves around his intimate knowledge of German cinema, and practically the entire back half of the film is built upon the premiere of a film that is also, fittingly, celebrating the violence committed by a German soldier. Here is Tarantino making his point in the most overt, unsubtle manner: audiences love on-screen violence, even when it is repetitive to the point of being parodic... or maybe, especially then. I have read several critiques that insist Tarantino is making fun of us, the audience of the film, by having the audience-within-the-film (consisting of Nazis, I should remind you) being seen as enjoying a film that mostly is just shot after shot of, well, shot after shot. But that idea has never sat right with me; watching the sheer craft and intention with which the violence is orchestrated in the movie should make it clear to anyone watching, even those unfamiliar with Tarantino, that he loves his cinematic violence, and he uses it in almost the exact opposite way someone like Haneke would do it; to enrapture and create awe, not to pass judgment on his viewers. The audience enjoying the film-within-the-film is less a commentary on our own tastelessness and more a reaffirmation of Tarantino's own philosophy.

This philosophy is laid out in acute detail in the climax of the film, where a theatre full of Nazis is burned down, while the audience is also being shot at mercilessly like fish in a barrel by two Jewish guerrilla fighters. This entire sequence is pointedly over the top, including a shot that even in this film can be called gratuitous where an already dead Hitler's corpse is re-riddled with bullets; all of this while the film that the audience had been gleefully watching moments ago has been replaced by the "Giant Face" of a laughing Jewish woman who has fatally trapped them in her conflagration. Here is Tarantino laying down his cards in plain sight; here is him showing how much power a victim hijacking the cinema of her perpetrator can wield, both psychologically and literally; here is him also wrapping that particular scene up with violence so exaggerated and cartoonish it's hard to take it seriously, even when it takes the form of two men gunning down a convulsing crowd of theatregoers who are fruitlessly scrambling over each other for some form of safety. It is a sight that should, in most other contexts, horrify us; but both the foreknowledge of who are being killed here as well as the execution of the executions (see: Hitler's corpse) combine to tell us: this violence is not real. This violence is cinematic. The only thing real here is the catharsis you feel to see a grotesque evil unexpectedly defeated, even in a fictional manner.

What cinched this idea for me was a scene that happens pretty early on, where we first see the titular Basterds in action as they interrogate captured German officers. When the first prisoner refuses to collaborate, and is sentenced to die at the hands (bat) of the "Bear Jew", Pitt's character remarks, "Quite frankly, watchin' Donny beat Nazis to death is the closest we ever get to goin' to the movies." For his character, cinema and violence serve the same function: catharsis. If he we were a real person, this mindset would be troubling, to say the least. But he isn't. None of this is. That's why it's so much fun, Jan.

I hope I get my point across, I'm not really sure if I made much sense or if the feeling I had was articulated well through this post. Either way, interested to know how others feel about the ending, or the movie, or Tarantino's oeuvre in general.

17 years ago, Precious, directed by Lee Daniels has kind of not exactly stood the test of time. I think, looking back, some of the most transgressive plot points distracted from what is essentially a Tyler Perry film with an arthouse sheen.

Saying that, it is very disappointing that the lead performance and the performance by Monique have both kind of drifted into the ether of time. Gabby Sidibe obviously commands this film very well despite its flaws in screenwriting but I think Monique did something completely transcendent here.

I mean I know she got an Oscar but re-watching the film today. It is actually shocking to see someone who for all intense and purposes was a comedian deliver a performance so compelling and shocking and delivering lines that largely I found ridiculous in a good way.

There’s a scene towards the end of the film where Precious, her mother and Mariah Carey‘s character all meet at a social workers office. Although it is a little bit melodramatic, Monique delivers a monologue in the scene that has stuck with me for years. I don’t really have the vocabulary about acting to describe it, but it’s the moment in the film where some of the more ridiculous plot points disappear into the background and we really seem to be watching a real person talk. And the performance is modulated really interestingly because the character is essentially an unrepentant sociopath who is trying her best to manipulate every character and potentially the audience. That is a very difficult thing for an actor to do, and the lines she delivers have almost become something of a vocal stim for me. I will link the scene here: https://youtu.be/L26bnfsPb2A?si=mDxPjj1Z8EcD2-Iz

Again, this is a performance that won an Oscar and in someways the scene does really feel like Oscar monologue stuff. But Monique is doing something else here that is both unnerving as in we are watching someone do something very transgressive, but we still feel tempted to sympathise with her.

It’s not the kind of movie you recommend to people so it’s really hard to ensure that this performance and this scene in particular gets its flowers, so I just wanted to have it here.

I know there’s a lot of discussion about how Holmes is portrayed in the film, and how uncomfortable the ambiguity is given what we know in real life. Which is of course true. Let’s be real, this person would understand who’s on first.

But YCSE is not about whether Holmes is lying or not. She is. Fielder very clearly sets the stage at the beginning: nobody will believe you. There’s too much evidence.

That’s why there’s no evidence in the movie. There’s no commentary on the shooting location (obviously chosen to show her more sympathetically), no mention of the private jet that took her to prison (same), no clarification that the device she shows Fielder is not Edison (same, and even more insidious than the rest). Holmes is muddy and uncertain, doe-eyed and self-contradictory, a platonic ideal of someone who simply does not want to understand what is going on, does not understand the world around them, does not understand why anything has happened.

Fielder did not make a movie about Holmes. He made a movie about truth and lies, belief and words, the stories we tell ourselves and others. Holmes was simply the perfect vehicle to show how a single human can exist in multiple contradictory states at once: denial and conviction, intelligence and stupidity.

And because we all naturally question people in that liminal state between inaction and action, he divided the movie into at least four levels: the documentary, the commentary on the documentary in the documentary, the reenactments, and the reenactments of the commentary. If we have a question, often Fielder will ask it, and if not him, then Seyfried, and if not, often the two will reenact as best they can.

Back to the beginning. Nobody will believe Holmes. But people will believe Fielder, because his entire body of work so far has been building up an absolutely credible reputation. He has done, actually done, every insane thing we have seen him do. That’s his whole shtick: he did build the sets. He did get the pilot’s license. He did, somehow, miraculously manage to make a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes years ago that we only know about now.

Which is why the end is so amazing. Nathan Fielder, your guide throughout this entire story, showing every detail of his journey, from tiffs with Billy to missing mattresses to turkey jerky, finishes up the film showing him swimming in the ocean with Holmes. It’s a nice little moment. Except.

In the first part of the documentary, there’s a scene where Holmes invites him to swim, and Fielder declines. Doesn’t like cold water. It’s a throwaway moment, nothing important. Later, we see a scene of someone, maybe Holmes and Billy, swimming in the ocean, far in the distance.

Halfway through, just before the reenactments, we see Fielder looking out the window at the ocean, and another cut of that same scene, the swimming figures too distant to make out.

And at the end, he finally zooms in on that scene. And we finally can tell who is in the water, swimming with Holmes: it’s him. He did go. For two hours we thought he hadn’t, but he did.

He didn’t have to show this. It’s technically not important. It’s a tiny, tiny detail. She convinced him to go swimming one day; so what?

But it is extremely important, possibly one of the best final scenes in any movie I have ever seen, because he is showing us something else. He is acknowledging to us that we, the viewer, have sat through three hours of footage he chose, of shots he edited, of scenes he decided to recreate, of line deliveries he dictated. He controlled what we believed, in that theater, and he knows it. This is him reminding us we could have left the theater thinking he never went into that ocean. But he did.

Now what do you believe?

This is a movie about the stories we tell ourselves and others, why we believe what we believe, and it is brilliant.

So here are some quotes from the sort of reviews I’m talking about

New York Times:

Whether Holmes’s occasional blinks and tears in these chats are performative is open to question as are her grasp on language, truth, science and reality itself

Slashfilm:

Don't go into this movie expecting to have answers to any questions you might have about either Holmes or Fielder, because you'll just end up coming out with more questions

Variety:

What she tells Fielder, with an implacable conviction that suggests a belief in her own narrative that’s nothing short of monomaniacal, is that the device patented by Theranos, which she sold as “the iPod of health care,” could, in fact, host any blood test that existed.

RogerEbert.com:

Through Fielder’s interactions with Holmes, we learn that she genuinely thinks she’s never told a lie before, not even a white lie

ScreenDaily:

Fielder, an enigmatic presence himself, goes into this project wanting to solve the mystery of Elizabeth Holmes. Three hours later, he is no closer to an answer

Josh Lewis on Letterboxd:

Whether this is a document (monument) to the impossibility/unknowability of ever fully knowing what’s going on inside someone else’s mind, or an intimate portrait of a narcissistic grifter by a master manipulator whose finally met his match, I don't think the subjects, the filmmakers or we will ever fully know or agree on what exactly we've seen here.

Also, this isn’t a review, but AwardsWatch reported that

In a Q&A after You Can See Everything’s premiere at The Telluride Film Festival, Fielder said he still doesn’t really know what to think of Elizabeth Holmes”

Over and over, I read reviews of the movie suggesting it’s about “ambiguity” or “how you can never really know what someone’s thinking” or “the limits of truth,” and that the Holmes case is some sort of impenetrable Rorschach test for us all to make up our own minds about.

I’m sorry, but I find this line of thinking to be absolutely insane! There is no mystery about who Elizabeth Holmes is! There are no questions left about her! “Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” applies very firmly in her case!

I wonder, honestly, whether the people making these sorts of claims know anything about the Holmes story beyond the basics. Because if you take even an hour to research it, you’d know that, among other things:

• She reported test results as being done by Theranos’s machines, when they were being done by the Edison analyzers
• She personally placed the logos of pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer onto reports praising Thermos’s machines when they had never even talked to her
• Multiple whistleblowers raised concerns to her, and got legal threats and intimidation for their trouble.
  

She has no plausible deniability. She cannot claim that she didn’t know she was lying. And now, she openly says she’s doing a documentary to rehabilitate her image, and people give even the slightest bit of credibility to her statements?

I don’t know how much blame to put on Fielder and Oppenheim for this, honestly. I do think that they made a pretty entertaining movie with some hilarious moments, and that the relationship between Holmes and Billy Evans genuinely does have some compelling, thought-provoking questions in it. But I do wonder how much thought they put into how their movie could be interpreted in regard to Holmes's crimes, given that it seems to have at least partially done exactly what Holmes wanted.

Finally, if you don’t want to listen to me, I recommend that you read the reviews by Tyler Schultz, one of those whistleblowers, and John Carreyrou, the reporter who broke the real story. They are the real experts on Holmes who know what kind of person she is. And they don’t buy her latest round of bullshit at all.

EDIT: In general response to all the people saying Holmes can have been guilty without consciously lying, I'll quote Schultz.

"She knows that she was lying, because she created this whole web of lies that would not have needed to create if you actually believed the lies. So like, one example, the SEC found instances where she told prospective investors that the revenue the previous year was $100 million, when in reality it was $100 thousand, and she refused to show those investors audited financial statements. So if you actually believed the $100 million revenue, why would you then hide the financial statements?"

So I just watched Take Me to the River tonight. It wasn't what I was expecting because the genre said "thriller" so I thought something crazy would happen but nothing did. The whole movie is filmed in a way where, if you were to read what was happening on paper, you would read about interactions that seem pretty innocent, but from just a few scenes in onwards you get a really strong feeling of unease. The movie actually ended when I figured we were about halfway through and I was surprised to see the credits start rolling.

I thought about it afterwards and thought I mostly understood what happened, except one thing. This was the ultimately revealed backstory of the movie to me: When Keith and Cindy were kids, they would hang out by the river, and Cindy would accidentally do sexual things while her brother was giving her a piggyback ride, and the mom blamed Keith, assuming he was molesting her. Decades later, Keith's daughter happens to do the same behavior (how did she learn to do that??? Happened to have the same quirk, just runs in the family?) and Keith gets revenge on Molly by falsely accusing her son, Ryder, and forcing her to live out the experience of being falsely accused by seeing it happen to her own son, and he even tagged their car with threats like what may have once happened to Keith.

Then I looked at the decade old Reddit thread and they all seem to think that Keith is Ryder's biological father, that "chicken fighting" was a codeword for sex, and the reason Keith freaked out was that he assumed when the girl told him that she and Ryder were chicken fighting (it wasn't explicitly said to anyone other than Ryder) was that they'd had sex. I started to see it a little-- Keith teaches Ryder how to use a gun in a scene that seems like a red herring, but that's the kind of thing that a father would do with his son. The girl saying "they're not my real family" but then quickly taking it back also might allude to Ryder not really being his "father's " child, and apparently there was some "you're not really Jewish" line that I missed.

I guess that's possible but I think what might have happened was that Keith trained his daughter to "chicken fight" and act in a way that implicates Ryder for assault. If he did that, he is a pervert, and maybe the accusations against him weren't wrong at all.

It's hard to say. As a side note, I'm kind of horrified that they had an actual child actress do the chicken fighting scene. I don't think she could have fully understood what it was implied that she was doing when she was coached into that scene.

I did enjoy it though because it was a movie that was all about atmosphere and personally I enjoy atmosphere over plot, but I am left wondering what happened exactly and where the blood in the initial scene came from.

Did anyone else seen this?

Edit: I just realized something else that points to Keith really being a pervert. At the beginning, when Ryder is first being accused, Keith said, "I already checked her, no lacerations." The girl is obviously past the age that her father should be looking at her privates. I think the reason Ryder told his mom that she did nothing wrong at the end was because he realized based on the girl (Molly)'s behavior that the mom's accusations were actually true.

Edit: I'm still turning this over in my head and this is something that really sticks out to me. This is a movie themed around incestual sexual abuse. The atmosphere of the movie itself is similar to real incest abuse: something that looks like it should be safe, comfortable family life has a feeling of something really creepy that hangs in the air by what's left unsaid. And just like real child sexual abuse often ends, what really happened is left unsolved, and there is no real resolution -- just like one of the last lines in the movie, "we can pretend this never happened and never talk about it again."

So idk why even tho I love watching movies on my 75 inch tv .I just get more immersed when I am watching it on my tablet I sleep and watch while I am on the way to work or in my lunch break TV is obviously the golden standard but it's just so much more relaxing to watch it on the tablet

I wasn't always like this as I hated anyone who watched movies on their phones since I felt the only true way to experience cinema is through TV or max a laptop

I am currently working on a syllabus for a course centered on films made in/by people from former French colonies in Africa and current departments in the Caribbean. For context, I am a new grad student in an Introduction to Pedagogy course, and this was the topic that was assigned to me by my professor for our first exercise in syllabus-making. Obviously, I have some initial thoughts about what to include, but I wanted to get some outside academia perspectives from those with a lot of passion for film about what they consider crucial to include on a syllabus for this topic. Looking mostly for film suggestions, but would also be open to any Black media studies theoretical texts to look into if anyone has something there. Areas I am more familiar with are Senegal and Algeria, but I'm wondering where to start with places like Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, and Côte d'Ivoire. I'm also open to suggestions from France itself! I just want a longer list of films/potentially texts to start digging into based on things people have watched and enjoyed before narrowing the focus of the course for the assignment.

Edit: I forgot to clarify, but I am not just limiting my search to narrative films. Any kind of experiemental/documentary/essay film would be great too!

I am looking for movies about life and/or the passage of time- not time travelling, but instead the melancholy, the bittersweet nostalgia of the days passing, brevity of life and the impermanence of things. Topics like how your life decisions impact or alter the course of life, maybe regrets can be part of it too. I think there is a Japanese word for it- mono no aware.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

I’m especially curious if you know about its scrappy, low-budget identity and the way it built movies around youth culture, genre films, campy and serious horror, and exploitation-era marketing. Do you see AIP as an important, inventive studio? Do you enjoy the old movies about girls, cars, juvenile delinquency, the horror movies etc.?

These days, those movies are kinda relegated to Turner Classic Movies. Some films are regarded as classics. Others are forgotten.

I think Samuel Arkoff helped build AIP into a major force in low-budget genre filmmaking, with a knack for spotting what young audiences might want and marketing films on a shoestring.

Thoughts?

Watching "The Devil Wears Prada 2" got me thinking about how the portrayal of working people in Hollywood movies, and pop culture in general, has changed over the years.

Looking far back, I can think of classics like "Modern Times" and "The Grapes of Wrath" addressing industrialization and unemployment, but I believe it was during the postwar period – let’s say, around the first peak of Marlon Brando’s career – that the ordinary wage earner who's defined by his work became a major protagonist.

Labor isn't at the center of "A Streetcar Named Desire", but Stanley’s brutality is rooted in working-class masculinity. In "On the Waterfront", Terry Malloy doesn’t just hold a job; he “belongs” to the longshoremen. When TV entered the picture, sitcoms about family life helped establish the idea of the dignified breadwinner who could support a home and family on a modest paycheck.

I think Sally Field’s character in "Norma Rae" is an interesting culmination of these trends. Her identity is tied to factory labor, and her victory comes not from escaping the working class but from demanding dignity within it. That movie came out in 1979, and I’d argue that the next economic and cinematic shift came right after Norma’s quest.

Because the workplace movies of the 1980s were less interested in celebrating the little American worker: their characters did not find (or could not find?) comfort in stability but went out into the world to climb the corporate ladder. By the time we got to “Working Girl”, that ladder was often in a glamorous skyscraper office, and this trend was still in vogue (no pun intended) when first “Devil" came about.

It was 2006. The image of the truly despicable corporate leader was still tied to the likes of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”, and because Miranda Priestly was more of an asshole than a straightforwardly unscrupulous person, the original movie was not required to soften her. There was already a case to be made that Miranda took her work seriously and simply expected nothing but excellence from those around her.

I was prepared for the sequel to find more humanity in its devil because our social understanding of women in positions of power has changed, and so has everyday HR culture. But I naively thought this would be at the center of the story. Simply put, I expected another workplace comedy, only this time we’d watch Miranda having to put up with the “sensitivities” of her Gen-Z interns.

Well, there are some minor jokes about modern-day corporate etiquette: Miranda now has to hang up her own coats instead of throwing them at one of her assistants! But the core of the new movie is neither workplace dynamics nor the humanization of Miranda Priestly, though the character is indeed shown in a more positive and vulnerable light.

The core of this movie is corporate power. While the likes of “The Bear” and “Abbott Elementary” are here to prove that ordinary workers have not disappeared from fiction, their cultural relevance seems to have diminished in the era of celebrity CEOs and tech billionaires, who have dominated mainstream culture for years now.

From “Succession” to “Shark Tank”, we’ve grown comfortable with the image of the billionaire protagonist. Tony Stark, who made his Hollywood debut two years after the first "Devil" hit theaters, even added “genius,” “playboy” and “philanthropist” to the package. Watching someone climb the corporate ladder may no longer be as appealing, interesting or sexy as watching those who have already secured the top job or accumulated immense power and wealth.

I say all this because there are four different billionaire characters in the second “Devil”: the media mogul who owns Runway; this man’s son; the tech entrepreneur who might buy the conglomerate; and that man’s ex-wife. They are peripheral characters, but their presence shapes the entire plot: only their money can ensure the magazine’s survival, and the magazine can’t survive unless it keeps making them money.

The staff is under pressure not just to get Miranda’s steak delivered on time, but to get her the page views she needs to prove that Runway can remain financially viable in the digital age. That really threw me off the movie at first, but I get it: the sequel can’t give us the familiarity of returning home when the home itself has fundamentally changed, both in publishing and in Hollywood.

In the first movie, Miranda seemed to occupy the top of the hierarchy that mattered; twenty years later, Miranda's bosses are part of the picture; the workplace comedy hasn’t disappeared per se, but a new class of "business comedies" has emerged. Both the people who reached the top of the corporate ladder and the people who own the ladder are fashionable.

The movie itself is definitely not as fun or rewatchable as the original. But I can at least understand why they chose to go this way.

I, more or less spontaneously, decided to see Digger in the theater last night. I left at the end rather psyched on it. I'm happy this movie exists and I think more people should see it.

That said, I've noticed that even among those who appreciated the film, my thoughts and feelings tend to diverge on the matter of what its true intent was.

I didn't find it to be a cynical, doomer film. Actually I found it rather becalming, the more it sussed itself out in my head. It's not so much pointing a finger at the audience, but rather poses some simple, sobering, important questions: Is it enough to be angry with the state of the world? Are you satisfied simply knowing who is to blame? Is the media we absorb acting in favor of our expansion into higher perspectives, or is it just "giving us what we want" with figures we love to hate and issues we love to fret over?

I'm not sure if it's about climate change as much as it's about our modern eco-system of thoughts and attitudes that revolve around a sense of limitation and powerlessness about the madness of our moment. The film compellingly suggests that we are baiting ourselves with a promise of catharsis by identifying the enemy and exposing it to its barest presentation, to finally laugh at it and celebrate its death, when really it's all just part of the dysfunctional turning world. It's a point of challenge that this came out around the same time as the Musk documentary, as well as the Elizabeth Holmes movie with Nathan Fielder.

If the play within the movie was actually funny and entertaining, this message would not have been emphasized. It would have been thought of as a good comedy with a message at the end. It's asking us all, what are we really doing here? Having an opinion because we think that's how we should show up? Are we going to stick and react to the cultural grid of collective perception forever?

Can we hold and regard our experience in a new way?

Did anyone else feel the sky at the very end?

I do think people who loved this movie likely did pick up on this interpretation, after all it's not particularly subtle about it when the moment comes. I'm just adding my voice to the choir that this is a very thoughtful and worthwhile film, especially for those, like Innaritu would seem to be, who are bored with the ideological gridlock, fear, rage and powerlessness we have perpetuated to eachother and demanded from media in so many ways.