- Women Talking is a powerful and moving film, but also incredibly cinematic and joyous, given its dark and difficult subject matter.
- EO doesn’t fully anthropomorphize the donkey for which it’s named, but it does ask you to empathize with it…which isn’t exactly hard, given how brutal and cruel most of the human characters he encounters are to him. And yet there are also moments of strange beauty throughout.
- Designing Woman is amiable enough, with some nice chemistry between its stars, but it’s also very dated and incredibly contrived.
- Skinamarink feels like being trapped in a nightmare. Not nightmarish exactly—although there are some (mostly implied) gruesome moments late in the film—but the terror and dread that can come only from being trapped by dream logic. I don’t think the movie needs to be as long as it is, but there are rewards for your (much-needed) patience, and it’s a fascinating work of experimental horror.
- Judy Holliday is just a delight, top to bottom, in Born Yesterday.
- Fade to Black is interesting but also very uneven, never really deciding what kind of movie it wants to be, or being any of its choices entirely convincingly.
- There are some striking images and good performances in Inside Daisy Clover—and maybe it felt more transgressive and shocking in 1965 to say that old Hollywood was a sham—but it feels a little too obvious and trite at times.
I also re-watched Barry Levinson’s Diner, which I really enjoyed. (It was interesting seeing a young Mickey Rourke in Fade to Black, made just the year before.) The movie is certainly sentimental and nostalgic, but it also does a good job of frequently undercutting that.
