The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

A really interesting cinema verite of the Gospel of Matthew, where the amateurism actually adds to the experience.

Dunkirk (2017)

A satisfying movie about an interesting corner of World War II, but not much more.

The Funhouse (1981)

Don't just stand there!  Run!

Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)

This originally appeared in the comments section of the late, lamented The Dissolve. 

Let’s Dissolve The Criterion Collection!

Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)
Directed by Peter Weir
Written by Cliff Green from the novel by Joan Lindsey
Criterion Spine #29

Note: I wrote this using the most recent Blu-Ray edition that came out in June 2014. Completely gratuitous self-promotion on this is that I got it at the semi-annual half-price sale at a Barnes & Noble *and* got to flip off Jenny McCarthy, there to sign whatever the hell she was promoting, on my way out the door. So there’s that.

I think it’s always interesting to contemplate artists, such as a director like Peter Weir, to whom you saw their career almost in reverse. I had seen plenty of Weirs works when I was younger, such as the underappreciated Witness and the horrifically over rated Dead Poets Society, but I’m not sure I was ever really that aware of him until The Truman Show, a movie I maintain is one of the better science fiction movies of the last quarter century. At that point, I started noticing his body of work more and decided to dig in a little deeper. It’s at this point, somewhere in 2000, that I first saw Picnic At Hanging Rock.

Il deserto rosso (Red Desert)

Madness might be the only sane reaction in this hellscape.

Table 19

Sometimes, a wedding just isn't a happy ending.

Beware The Slenderman

An interesting surprise of a documentary, in that this look at the Slenderman assault in Wisconsin starts out as a look at memes and how they propagate and how this affected the two attempted murderers but then slowly shifts into a look at how mental illness was a factor. It's that second part that was much more interesting to me, as I was pretty much familiar with all the meme stuff (Creepy pasta, got it, Richard Dawkins, eh, memetics, so forth and so on). But the interviews with families of the girls involved in this get deeper and more complex as everyone tries to come to some sort of understanding of what happened (and jeeeez, did I feel for the parents of the accused).

2017 - Written and directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky