I have a love-hate relationship with Letterboxd. One one hand, the “social film discovery” app is a movie buff dream. If you have ever scribbled down every movie you watch in a notebook or an Excel sheet (I did the former and still do the latter), Letterboxd is close to perfection. You can rate, save, list and review all the movies in the world. The app is also great to gauge critical consensus in a way that feels almost scientific. Letterboxd’s star-based rating system, coupled with the engagement of their passionate user base, makes their global ratings extremely granular.
On the other hand, the very vibrant, very opinionated Letterboxd community has a tendency for hot takes and loud posturing that can be exhausting. Doomscrolling Letterboxd reviews can make you hate a movie you love. But this frenzy also urges you to write, and write well about movies. After logging my last two years of cinema, I felt compelled to channel my inner movie critic on a small set of films I watched during the summer. And I started from a place of pure comfort…
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Directed by James Cameron (1991)
Letterboxd Rating: 4.5 Stars
Terminator 2 should be an old movie by now. Its titular Judgment Day, the name of the fateful date when a computer intelligence named Skynet would go sentient and wipe us all from the surface of the Earth, was supposed to take place a quarter-century ago. Yet after three decades and four more dispensable Terminator entries, the powered-up sequel of James Cameron’s tech noir classic hasn’t lost an ounce of its slickness. Once groundbreaking, the special effects may have been surpassed, but they still convey a queasy sense of doom in Robert Patrick’s T-1000, the shapeshifting hunting machine set against Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, now configured in good-shepherd mode to protect a teenage John Connor (Edward Furlong), future saviour of humankind. If you only remember the CGI, come back for Patrick’s uncanny body language and blank stare, the perfect counterpoint to Arnie’s clunkier cyborg, updated with a touch of warmth and hilarious deadpan. This is sharp, masterful entertainment. To propel the story forward, not a single second is wasted, and the action remains absolutely bonkers. James Cameron, in full command of his art, obliterates helicopters, trucks and corporate headquarters with supreme confidence and a stunning visual flair. In most frames, the omnipresence of that blue hue is not only a gorgeous visual signature, it also works as a subtle metaphor for an impending technological catastrophe, a menace that resonates in strange new ways decades later.
Hoosiers
Directed by David Anspaugh (1986)
Letterboxd Rating: 3.5 Stars
In American lingo, a hoosier is a resident of the state of Indiana. Former US Vice-President Mike Pence is a proud hoosier, and, quite predictably, he once called Hoosiers the “greatest sports movie ever made”. This says a lot about the film’s aura in Indiana, a land of pastures and a GOP voters where basketball seems to be a statewide religion. The film tells the comeback story of a veteran coach (Gene Hackman) who lands in a small town to turn around a losing high school team, under the scrutiny of the local crowd. The story unfolds at an odd pace, as Hackman’s character keeps making bizarre coaching decisions, but that makes Hoosiers less formulaic than your everyday sport drama. The plot, including a half-hearted love story, is almost secondary. Hoosiers works best as a faux documentary on basketball in small town America, with its sharp portrayal of intrusive parents and vivid location details (note the signage inside the team bus). The game scenes, shot in Steadicam, look majestic, with the actors-athletes recruited for the film providing much-needed veracity in every play (some crowd reactions were captured during real-life games in Indiana). If basketball movies help you make sense of the American idea, watch this one as a rural (and yes, all white) companion to Hoop Dreams and White Men Can’t Jump.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie (2023)
Letterboxd Rating: 4 Stars
While recent Mission: Impossible movies introduced a grittier edge to the super-spy saga, this seventh instalment feels like an homage to more naive blockbuster entertainment. The villain, this time, is some sort of truth-threatening AI. This should be right on point for our tech anxieties of 2023, but the menace struggles to take shape on screen, reminiscing how the early Internet was portrayed in B-movies from 1995. There’s also a silly artefact to chase—a cruciform key whose purpose remains unclear after 223 minutes of running time—and a possible nod to John McTiernan’s Hunt for Red October. One year after Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise continues his sacrificial streak to bring people back to movie theaters. He partially succeeded this time (MI7 underperformed in the Barbenheimer summer), but there’s something comforting, even admirable, in his commitment to battle the twilight of movie stars with life-or-death stunt antics. Don’t think you’ve already seen it all with that motorcycle jump, which feels anticlimactic after months of promotional hype. There are bigger thrills in the final act, and still a remarkable chemistry between characters old and new.
Nocturnal Animals
Directed by Tom Ford (2016)
Letterboxd Rating: 4 Stars
Susan, an art gallery owner from Los Angeles (Amy Adams), is married to an unfaithful husband (Arnie Hammer) when she receives an advanced copy of the book written by her ex-lover (Jake Gyllenhaal). From there, Nocturnal Animals blends stories and characters: Susan reminisces on her past relationship as she immersed herself in the gruesome plot of the book, in which a grieving man (the same Gyllenhaal) seeks revenge against the desert goons who killed his wife and his daughter. There are questionable parallels between the two stories, and the message remains, at best, hazy (is it… an anti-abortion movie?). Yet, fashion designer-slash-director Tom Ford is a master of mood, and despite the malaise—or because of it—it’s hard not to look away at a film so gorgeously shot. The A-List cast, including Michael Shannon as a Texas detective with nothing to lose, offers pitch-perfect performances across timelines. The moral of the story may be vain (and, judging by the final scene, petty as hell), but Nocturnal Animals remains a confounding maze of a movie delivered with just enough bravura to conceal its murky core.
First Man
Directed by Damien Chazelle (2018)
Letterboxd Rating: 5 Stars
First Man offers a resounding proof that movies can revisit the most celebrated events in popular imagination—in that case, the 1969 moon landing—in new and arresting ways. Returning with two of his La La Land partners, leading man Ryan Gosling and composer Justin Horowitz, who delivers another classic score for the ages, Chazelle triumphs on the smallest and biggest scale. Adapting the Neil Armstrong biography of the same name, the director composes an affecting portrait of a marriage in Armstrong and wife Janet Shearon (Claire Foy), two resilient figures burdened with impossible grief after the loss of their child. Their stoic relationship, built on commitment and unsaid words, offers a stunning contrast with the space scenes, which brilliantly capture the breathtaking power, fragility and plain insanity of the entire Apollo enterprise. It’s all fire and metal-clanging furor until the moment, the one seen a million times, which Chazelle captures with infinite grace. A terrific moviemaking achievement, First Man interweaves Armstrong’s personal tragedy and his universal legacy with crushing emotional force.
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