One of the most cherished aspects, and somewhat of a mystery of why films of classic Hollywood are so structurally sound in terms of scene writing, blocking and photography, which was lost in later eras, may have at least partially have been explained by how people actually watched films. You didn't necessarily watch films from the beginning. Many would just walk into a film and sit through until they get to the walk-in part again, or sit through it 1.5 times, etc. I'm not sure just how prevalent this was, there's a lot of anecdotal report supporting it, and there is the story that Hitchcock changed it all when he made an agreement with theater owners to restrict admission for Psycho, due to its unique construction. But, if indeed this walk-in habit wasn't rare it probably meant that individual scenes in classic films had to be self-contained narratively. They had to make sense and have a satisfaction that didn't necessarily require knowing the whole story (though that would certainly help). They had to be enjoyable, and readable in their own right. For me, watching films of the 1940s-1950s feel exactly this way. Every scene is tight, has its own internal logic, and I'm always aware of just what is going on in a local way, what kind of person is arguing with what kind of person, the various apparent motivations, and usually the photography itself has its own relish and enjoyment. (The Netflixification of film, which has been apparently been designed around people watching streaming films on open tabs, and with other things going on, solves this problem by having the plot restated over and over again in dialogue, it is said. A very different kind of structural thing, which actually adds to the overall dissatisfaction of straight through film watching.)

This walk-in habit also makes interesting appeals to the idea of watching films like how directors intended them, at least in the Classic Hollywood age, as they must have had start to finish ambitions for film watchers, but they also must have envisioned that people could/would enter a film 25 minutes in, and even might sit through it a 2nd time.

As film start times became more rigid - by now I hate missing even the first seconds of a film even - films themselves must have changed.

*interestingly enough, when multiplexes came around, kids (and others) started sneaking into second films after they had started, reliving some of that older school film going experience.

Edit in: Taratino captures some of this in his Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, where Sharon Tate notices that the movie she is in is playing across the street. She doesn't care at all what time the film started, she just wants to get in free (ie, be recognized/acknowledged) and watch it. She goes in and just enjoys herself like crazy, like a typical movie goer.

I’m a big fan of French-Algerian director Tony Gatlif. His movies usually screen at the European festivals and then disappear, and I don’t understand why.

Here’s a list of prices he’s won:

Cannes Film Festival (2004): Best Director for Exils.
Cannes Film Festival (1993): Un Certain Regard Award for Latcho Drom.
Locarno Film Festival (1997): Silver Leopard and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury for Gadjo Dilo (The Crazy Stranger).
César Awards: Best Original Music for Gadjo Dilo (1997).
CineFest Miskolc International Film Festival (2021): Lifetime Achievement Award.

I remember renting his movies Gadjo Dilo and Latcho Drom back in the video store days, and I’ve found most, but not all, of his other movies online in less than stellar quality—often without subtitles—on sites I maybe wouldn’t recommend using. They don’t stream anywhere, at least not in my area (Sweden, plus international services). The physical releases consist of out-of-stock DVDs.

Is it just the fact that he’s not that popular? Are the movies stuck in some kind of copyright hell? What do you think? I can't find any information online. He's even still active; it's not like he made a couple of movies a hundred years ago and disappeared.

I guess I’m just bitter that some of my favorite movies ever aren’t available in good quality anywhere.

Edward Norton plays Monty, a convicted drug dealer about to start a seven-year prison sentence. The movie follows how he spends his final hours of freedom.

Instead of this rah-rah "USA, USA" patriotism some other filmmakers might've shown, Spike Lee captured the feeling of collective anger and grief that was still fresh among the citizens. Revisiting this film, I'm still struck by how it depicts a society that was coldly awoken to the illusion of security. One critic wrote that "25th Hour is as much an urban historical document as Rossellini's Open City, filmed in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Rome".

How do we grapple with the choices we made, and what will we do with the time we have left? Tomorrow is not guaranteed.

In the late 1990s, as a small boy, it felt to me as if they were popping up all over the place. Successful independent debut, followed up by an Altmanesque epic. Thinking back to that era of movies, examples I can think of are Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs>Pulp Fiction), Paul T. Anderson (Hard Eight> Boogie Nights) and Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse>Happiness).

Am I missing other examples?

Just randomly thought of this movie and I immediately started watching it. At first I really thought, "Wait, how is this a Fincher film and not Tense?" Because it felt like a typical 2000s drama at the start, but as it progressed, it got more and more tense, until I was fully locked in. Fincher brought his distinctive camera work and color grading gradually yet brilliantly in the movie. I'd call it a classic survival thriller, but with surprisingly more twists and turns than I had expected in a home invasion movie.

Found the screenplay to be tight and impressive, absurdly comedic and too bloody at the same time, classic Fincher. The Chekhov's guns were handled brilliantly. Every single thing shown on screen had a purpose for later. Every single dialogue held up.

It kind of reminded me of Single White Female: a female protagonist, a single location, New York, claustrophobia, running for her life. Both scripts take a similar approach to planting seeds and paying things off. That said, let me be clear, these are two very different movies, and I'm not comparing them directly actually. It's just a reflection that crossed my mind while watching.

I badly wanted to see Jodie Foster in action, and she does not disappoint. Her control and grace over every scene are enough on their own to elevate this movie. She carries it as the protagonist, but that's not to undersell everyone else. Every supporting actor plays their role brilliantly, and Kristen Stewart shines as the child star of the film.

I liked how clearly the movie established its "good" and "bad" guys. It's one of those films where catharsis is really the only place it can go, and it delivers that satisfyingly.

I enjoyed the twists and turns, highs and lows in the movie. One scene the ball's in Meg's court, the next scene the tables are completely flipped. Neither side ever held a true edge for long.

Up until the second act, I was second-guessing whether this is really a Fincher film. But once the third act kicked in, the stakes shot up far higher than anything set up earlier. It got tense, bloody, and genuinely engaging, disgusting at some points too, if I'm honest. Because by the end I was left thinking, "if I were in that house, I wouldn't have let the antagonist off that easy."

Well, the same fact proves that the movie did exactly what it was supposed to do; to make the viewer immersed in the atmosphere.

That's why I guess Fincher handled everything pretty well. No disappointment, just wanted Burnham to punch Raoul in the face so bad, like REAL bad.

Beautifully shot. Simplifies the story of life almost to a contrived degree. Yet it is effective. It works. Simply due to its setting in a Buddhist monastery. The use of Buddhist teaching as a medium to tell the simplified tale of life makes it an endearing watch. Because the actions are simple, yet they are presented not from a judgmental perspective. They become simply a part of the life cycle.

Spring welcomes budding flowers. Raw in nature, innocent, ignorant, full of mistakes unknown to them. The master imparts his teachings to make a better human out of the apprentice.

Summer transforms the flower into a fruit. Ready to ripen. Feelings are expressed; love blossoms. It's human nature to have desires, and to reap all the pleasures from them and bear all the sufferings therefore.

Autumn comes; old leaves must fall, so that young may sprout later on.

The harshness of winter turns the apprentice into the master, wise, knowledgeable, experienced; yet, he still has to bear the burden of all the guilt he has accumulated in his life. The suffering continues; his temperament towards it has matured.

Another spring comes, and the cycle repeats itself.

The movie is full of symbolism. Different animals are associated with different seasons. The puppy symbolises the joy and innocence of youth. The chicken represents greed. The cat represents purity. The fish, frog and snake are lower life forms who bear the suffering imparted by the apprentice. There is a gate to the monastery, but it has no walls, as it does not serve as a barrier. It has demons and angels drawn on it on the outside and inside, respectively, symbolising the contrast between the world outside - full of desires and suffering; and the world inside - one of equanimity. Almost all the shots are asymmetrical, referring to the imperfection and the high-and-low nature of life.

Despite all the knowledge of good and bad, the protagonist still errs, causing more suffering in the world; and he must come to terms with his wrongdoings. There is no penance, no absolution, no salvation. The guilt and suffering will always be there.

By the end of the film, I was really enjoying Drive My Car. But it took a looooonnnggg time to get there, and I'm still not sure why it had to be almost 3 hours. What's your take on this?

The main parts where it lost me were the theatre rehearsal scenes, which take up a significant amount of time. I generally enjoy slow films, but the rehearsal scenes didn't seem slow, as much as stationary. What are these scenes really about? I just felt like I was watching some actors, playing actors, rehearsing a play, but with no idea why. But did they work for you? And what would you say is their importance to the film as a whole?

I also find it impossible to get invested in stories within stories. That made it hard for me to draw connections between the story of the play and the story of the film. That could just be me though. Another difficulty is that I've heard of Chekov's play Uncle Vanya, but I know literally nothing about it. I was wondering if the film assumes a degree of familiarity that I don't have?

The main things I took from the film were the fantastic performances, cinematography, and the details of Japanese life. So it was well worth a watch. But it felt to me like a 2-hour film that took 3 hours.

Looking forward to hearing everyone's opinions on this - particularly people who loved it and want to talk about what I was missing.

I've watched the film and loved it, but one thing that confused me was almost everything surrounding the scenes featuring the disfigured girl. How does it tie in to the themes/arc of the main character, if at all? And what role does her brother play? In her final scene. where she walks into the ocean, he watches from the window and screams, and then transforms into what seems to be a skinned animal? (Like one that you'd see hanging in a butchery).

That scene is around the 1 hour 52 minute mark for those who want a refresher.

First of all, the cinematography is amazing and it fits the dreaminess and the detachment of the movie so well that I don't think it'd be quite the same without it. The score by Air is invaluable to the movie's mood too, and within the broader music scene, I think it really set Air apart from their contemporaries.

I think the movie still holds up today in how it portrays societal indifference to teen illness and how troubled children are alienated. Seeing the events unfurl is particularly heart-breaking because of how contingent and preventable everything was. Indifference, fear, glamorization are all symptoms of the neighbourhood's passivity towards the plight of the girls. The adults turn blind eyes to them so as to label them as anomalies in a perfectly happy community, their peers alienate them because of their perceived "oddity", and the boys glamorize them for the sake of spinning their own tales of heroism where the girls are trophies to be rescued from their balconies through telescopes.

All these different forms of passivity push the girls towards fringes where they're observed instead of aided. The only instance of any "help", by the mother, is one that is warped and distorted with a desire to possess. I don't think it'd be a stretch to say Mrs. Lisbon urged for the girls to be locked so as to cut off any budding independence and keep them virgin, in a sense. She only allows the girls to be out insofar that the boys' intentions are "honourable" and that they're supervised by their father. The hard part is that her desires were right in that she wanted to protect the girls but crashed down on them akin to an avalanche of restriction.

Much can be said about all those who observe, but little can be said about the ones observed and that's the point of the film. It's easy to say that the girls ended their lives because of the sheer isolation as a rational explanation but that doesn't do their emotional headspace the justice it deserves, not in any way that can be done with words from the girls themselves. The boys do the girls wrong in completely shrouding them in mystery and untouchability, mythologizing five very human and feeling girls, but so do we as watchers when we reduce their actions as an "expected" and logically rooted, from our eyes, response to isolation. Albeit in a different way.

Suicide makes a person unknowable if they haven't left a paper trail to posthumously read through their inner state with. We, as observers, can only resort to explanations rooted in psychology to form some sense of a "Why?" and even writing and speech cannot sincerely capture the specific happenings in someone's head that lead them to it, whether it be for us or for the person themselves. It is the ultimate form of self-alienation given how completely it decimates any attempt of understanding or knowing.

I haven't watched a movie that crystallizes the unknowability of suicide so well as this film, and that's partly because of the little experience and taste I have with films so I'd love if anybody reading this could make similar recommendations!

Disney Channel's Camp Rock (2008) is an adaptation of Cinderella that translates its entire logic, piece by piece, for a modern context in which statuses aren't fixed facts about the world anymore, but something you have to constantly perform and re-earn.

Shoes

In the premodern world of Perrault, the protagonist's status was baked into things directly: the shoe fits or it doesn't, and that's the end of the inquiry. Biology is in some way still destiny and the body you're born with settles, in advance, what role you get and how people treat you. Modernity is what happens once that kind of naturalness stops being available, and status has to be actively granted by other people instead of just read off the body. That's the swap Camp Rock makes at its core: the prince isn't searching for a body anymore, he's searching for a voice, which (unlike a foot) can't be checked once and filed away. It has to be recognized again and again by someone willing to keep recognizing it. Which is why the movie can't end the way Cinderella ends: no coronation, Mitchie goes home with a stamp of approval that's temporary and revocable by design.

Mirrors and lies

Once that swap is in place, everything else kinda follows the same rule, almost as if it's the same problem in different costumes. A medieval peasant who wanted to reinvent himself had to leave the network that defined him (move to another town if possible, start over somewhere nobody knew his status), while the modern subject tries to reinvent himself inside the network instead, reshaping the image without ever changing position. So Mitchie doesn't leave the camp, but just performs a different self within it, and the performance has to keep working comically in real time or it collapses.

And the two leads, Mitchie and Shane, somewhat never actually meet each other, for there's no unmediated moment between them anywhere in the film: she already thinks she knows him from television, while he hears her disembodied voice before he ever gets to talk to her as a person. And even when they finally do speak, Mitchie is always playing some role: the kitchen helper, then the ordinary camper, then the liar, then the co-performer in front of a hundred people. It's true that Perrault/Grimm's Cinderella already has a representation of the prince too, but the prince there is mostly an institutional figure, not someone you think you know intimately just because of some TV program (as the opening shows). Here the relationship between Cinderella/Mitchie and the prince Shane is constituted by reflections from the very start, and even the final performance leaves you with an uncanny feeling, as if they were still performing for each other, even as they shake hands and smile for the crowd.

Food

The flour scene is a direct visual quote of the original tale: Perrault's heroine covered in ashes, Grimm's the same but with even more aristocratic contempt. Soot in the old versions of the story is residue, proof of labor imposed on the protagonist from outside - a natural fact that constantly confirms her subordinated status. Flour in Camp Rock works in the opposite direction from another kind of powder: stage makeup, which makes the surface more visible instead of hiding it. Mitchie's flour isn't imposed, it's chosen, applied mid-lie specifically to protect a fabricated identity from collapsing under recognition.

The food fight scenes work on the same fault line. For most of the runtime the movie is suspiciously spotless, a summer camp where nobody sweats, nobody's hair is out of place, like everyone showered thirty minutes ago. The only scenes that get genuinely dirty involve food: Tess and Caitlyn hurling lunch at each other to humiliate one another, Mitchie dumping tacos on herself while trying to dodge Caitlyn right before her lie is about to surface. Food fighting as humiliation can only work in a setting where everyone's supposed to be equals and bodies are supposed to stay clean, which is also tangled up with how immaterial labor gets treated in late modernity. Every time food breaks into the film and causes a mess, on top of animalizing everyone involved, it's also putting pressure on the exact status these aspiring popstars are trying to maintain: mess is what happens to bodies that still do physical labor, and these kids are supposed to be past that.

All this mess-making has a hidden infrastructure, obviously: someone has to keep the cabins spotless, the hall running, the food actually appearing on trays three times a day - and that someone is Mitchie's mother, the film's only character doing something straightforwardly material, confined to the kitchen while aspiring popstars consume and compete to be looked at. Her work isn't just backgrounded, it's the precondition for everyone else's cleanliness to read as natural rather than serviced.

Anagnorisis

The moment Shane first hears the voice under the window and doesn't know it's her isn't innocent, but already close to an expropriation: the thing that makes Mitchie who she is inside this universe can be recorded, copied, reproduced infinitely, legally owned by someone else entirely, in a way a foot never could be. Building an identity here might be freeing, but it comes with constant negotiation and constant risk of being taken from you.

The ending reaffirms this ambivalence instead of resolving it. Three months later, everyone's friends (even Tess and Caitlyn!) and they're recording a song for fun in soundproofed garage. If status is never a fact you land on but a practice you keep performing, there's no room left that's actually off duty, and even hangout time gets restaged as content, even the domestic sphere has to be invaded by aspiration. Camp is over, but a moment of relaxation among new friends becomes yet another opportunity to stage oneself and present oneself in the form of a cultural product. The ending is lucid and ruthless, even if not necessarily cruel: in Camp Rock, the music is loud enough to drown out the incessant noise of the stove and the dishwasher.

Maddie’s Secret ostensibly makes hay of the afterschool special, though those heavy-handed TV weepies were at least in touch enough with their ethos to successfully mine melodrama for pathos. Maddie’s Secret is so couched in its own smug slickness that it’s very difficult to care about anyone, least of all Maddie. Early does little to allay this tonal awkwardness as the goofy parts are as goofy as the sad parts are sad, which is to say not at all. He does an admirable job playing Maddie, though his decision to star in drag serves little function within the film other than to nab him more screen-time. Actually, I suppose it could be some comment on femininity as performance, but that would be giving him too much credit.

Maddie’s Secret half-bakedness could be read as downstream of the melodramas it take inspiration from. It fails spectacularly as homage, however, due to its lack of genuine appreciation for that to which it intends to pay tribute. The camp value of Sirk and Waters is based in stylistic choices which were practical reactions to the material conditions and generic conventions under which those films were produced. Sirk used lush color palettes and stylized lighting to signify alignment with certain characters and heighten drama. Waters was forced by shoestring budgets into being brash and outre as possible, a means of generating interest, controversy, engagement. Above all else, these choices were sincere, intentional, and original, marked by some degree of social consciousness, or at the very least, curiosity.

Early flattens those stylistic quirks into an emptyheaded PoMo game of allusions, divorced entirely from their original function and effect. The vaseline focus and technicolor filter doesn’t just wash over Maddie’s home to signpost her Pollyanna perfection; it’s schmeared over everything, to the point where the film feels more akin to an overcooked Adult Swim short than anything worth your time in a theatre.

An excerpt from my substack review: https://open.substack.com/pub/movieswithmemax/p/maddies-secret-not-being-very-good?r=2r09du&utm_medium=ios

Am I the only one who thinks there was a very specific type of movie that basically existed from the late 90s to the mid-2000s?

I'm talking about movies like Jawbreaker, Cruel Intentions, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Sugar & Spice, The Faculty, American Psycho 2, Carrie 2, The Butterfly Effect, and Jennifer's Body.

They're all pretty different on paper, but they somehow give me the exact same vibe.

They all have that glossy Y2K aesthetic, over-the-top fashion, dark humor, ridiculously dramatic teenagers, and this weird dreamlike atmosphere where nobody acts like a real person. Everyone is either a sociopath, a manipulator, or one bad day away from committing a felony.

A lot of these movies got mixed reviews when they came out, but years later they've become cult classics. They're campy, stylish, kind of trashy in the best possible way, and way more memorable than a lot of "better" movies from the same era.

I don't really think of them as teen comedies, thrillers, or horror movies. They feel like their own weird little genre that Hollywood was making for a few years and then suddenly stopped.

I've jokingly been calling it things like:

• Y2K Teen Trash Cinema
• Teen Sleaze Noir
• Millennial Camp Thrillers

Does anyone else know what I'm talking about? And what other movies would you put in this category?

Because I'm convinced there are like 20-30 movies that all share this exact energy.

Have found people point to Equilibrium as the closest successor to The Matrix, my favorite film of all time, and I have been searching for something that replicates that specific totalitarian dread. So I finally watched it. And my god, what an experience.

Equilibrium really turned out to be a fundamentally different film, found it much colder, deliberately emotionless, and anchored by incredibly immersive world building. I myself think Matrix focused more on the style while this movie focused on the concrete dread.

In a society where the biggest crime is to feel, and humans are medically deprived of that innate element, this movie delivers from start to finish. The script is razor-sharp. The dialogue is tight, the internal logic holds up, and the characters are well-written and easily comprehensible. Even with such a high-concept premise, it hooks you immediately and never lets go.

The performances are fantastic. Christian Bale completely anchors the film. His character arc is so well established that you immediately connect to his journey, his traumatic past, and his inevitable rebellion.

And the screenplay is a masterclass in setup and payoff. The Chekhov's guns are executed brilliantly, and all the scenes connect to present a tight, coherent narrative altogether.

The action sequences were iconic in this film. While clearly inspired by The Matrix, they carry their own highly distinguishable flavor and rhythm. What impressed me most about them is that the movie prioritizes its suffocating world-building over constant shootouts. For a sci-fi dystopian action film, there is actually a surprising restraint with the action, but when it happens, it fits perfectly into the narrative structure. Each action feels meticulously earned rather than randomly inserted.

I guess George Orwell's 1984 is clearly the foundational inspiration here, and the totalitarian regime feels genuinely disturbing. The dystopian world itself crawls under your skin. It is cold, colorless, calm, and utterly devoid of emotion.

I personally think this movie was panned upon release since a masterpiece like Matrix preceded it, and audiences dismissed it as a cheap rip-off. Many still do. But that is completely inaccurate. It is a totally a very different film than The Matrix, the other side of the dystopian coin per se.

The Matrix makes you question The Dystopia; Equilibrium makes you LIVE in it.

This is a brilliant movie that never gets you bored and has that impeccable quality to be rewatched multiple times. It is just simply cool. Once again, I enjoyed it.

I'm honestly so confused by this movie. Margot (Grace Kelly) gets sentenced by a court and, on the day before her execution, the lead inspector, Mr. Combing-Mustache, starts a whole new investigation? What about due process?

Apparently, Hitchcock admitted that Dial M for Murder (1954) was routine work, shot in just 36 days to fulfill his studio contract. But the trope of the "perfect murder," which he explored in Rope (1948), seems to return here as a farce and maybe an ironic comment on the genre.

Many elements seem hilariously improbable. It starts with physical absurdities: Grace Kelly is being strangled, stabs her attacker in the back with a pair of scissors just once, and somehow he falls backward onto the scissors and dies? Haha.

Then we have the genius inspector, who initially investigates Grace Kelly and only after the court has sentenced her to death and any appeal is too late decides at the very last second to investigate the husband instead??? All of this makes very little sense from a legal perspective, unless you understand it as Hitchcock mocking the genre itself.

The bourgeois male obsession with the perfect crime could be seen as the true subject of the film. In Rear Window (1954), released that same year, Grace Kelly still possessed agency within the patriarchal order. Here, however, she is reduced to a passive object operating between four men who are all obsessed with crime:

Her husband (Tony): Who has been planning her murder ever since he discovered her affair.

The fraudster (Swann): Whom the husband blackmails into becoming a hitman.

The American boyfriend (Mark): A crime novelist who explains how he gets into the mind of a murderer.

The Inspector (Hubbard): A relic from a bygone era who represents the authority of the patriarchal order.

When viewed through these four vectors, a homosocial and latently homoerotic scene emerges, much like in Rope.

By committing adultery, the boyfriend effectively emasculates the husband. While the film highlights money as the central motive, we could also see the husband's humiliation and loss of control over the woman, the central prize of the patriarchal order, as a motive.

The husband uses another man to commit his murder for him: a former college acquaintance who has fallen from upper-class grace and now survives as a small-time con artist. The husband seems to derive a distinct sadistic pleasure from laying bare his peer's downfall and forcing him into committing murder.

The wounded male ego takes revenge not only on the woman, but on another, socially weaker man, reclaiming a sense of lost masculinity through his domination of him. In modern terms, the boyfriend made a cuckold out of the husband, so the husband seeks out a subordinate man to perform a surrogate act of domination.

Into this chaos of patriarchal vectors steps the Inspector. He initially subjects the woman to the doom of the judicial system, only to play the all-knowing savior outside of due process. He acts as the protective father figure and deus ex machina.

Just like Rope, Dial M for Murder deconstructs bourgeois-patriarchal civility. But while Rupert in Rope experiences a genuine catharsis, Inspector Hubbard feels more like a farce. In the face of upper-class horrors, at least we can still rely on the man with the well-combed mustache. But what when he is gone?

I organized an AMA/Q&A with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. He has written and directed films such as Cronos, The Devil's Backbone, Blade II, Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley, Pinocchio, Frankenstein, and more.

It's live here now in r/movies for anyone interested in asking a question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1wbk0id/hello_reddit_im_guillermo_del_toro_ama/

He will be back at 2 PM ET today to answer questions. I recommend asking in advance. Please ask there, not here. All questions are much appreciated!

Thank you :)

His verification/proof photo: https://i.imgur.com/Y4tyAa0.png

Rating: 8.5/10

Watched: September 6, 2026

I remember the first time I saw this, very many years ago. Like almost every movie I've ever seen, I went in blind, knowing only the very, very basics.

The absolute astonishment I felt at the penultimate moment lingers with me still. It was and still is a truly bizarre script-flip that had me both laughing AND going 'what the actual'. It's great, and this movie is also great.

Does it have the same old tired 30 year olds as teens? Yes, it sure does. But unlike other movies, I feel like somehow Sleepaway Camp cares even less in helping us accept the obvious age disparity. It's basically saying 'yes, these are grown adults' and then just going on with the movie.

The only other movie to show absolute disdain for this is My Bloody Valentine, with Keith Knight as Hollis, starring Keith Knight's moustache, which surely took a decade to grow, so we know HE wasn't a teenager.

Anyways, I digress. Sleepaway Camp's got a lot going for it. Sexual confusion, murder, hijinks, the usual things we can expect from any movie of this particular horror sub-genre. What it does, it does well. Sleepaway Camp earns the fandom's respect for this, and for a character reveal I don't think anyone back then could've even IMAGINED

So I want to talk about Aunt Martha instead, because if you've seen Sleepaway Camp, you know what it's about.

Aunt Martha's only in this movie for the first two minutes or so, but she is so cartoonishly bonkers from the very moment she strolls onto the screen in her bright yellow sweater and weird hat ... thing. She talks like she's aware that she's in a movie and is so deranged in her self-asides that every time I watch this one, all I want is Aunt Martha's origin story.

She's absolutely responsible for the lunacy Angela displays. While she wanders, vacant-eyed through the camp's day-to-day, Angela shows a level of cruel dispassion for the suffering she puts her victims through. It's almost like Wes Craven gave Robert Hiltzik some crib notes.

It might seem odd to fixate on Aunt Martha, but I feel like she's a pretty unexplored area of discussion when we talk about Sleepaway Camp. It's understandable given everything else about this movie, but as far as antagonists, accidental or otherwise, go?

Aunt Martha's a bona fide nutcase and I love everything about her. Sleepaway Camp gets a solid 8.5 from me because of that and because of the penultimate reveal. To hit that 10-spot, I would've needed a lot more Aunt Martha being Aunt Martha.

Has anybody seen this film? It seems to have gone way under the radar. I'm going to do a mini review below, but I'd welcome everybody's thoughts on whether people liked it as much as I did:

It's a very lovely film. It's a drama about a young woman who defects from North Korea to South Korea via China. Apparently there are about 250 people who do this every year. Before the pandemic there was about 1500 annually. They do it for obvious reasons and with the hope of sending money back to their family.

We follow Hye Seon (very well played by Kim Min-ha) as she is detained at what effectively is a migrant centre and then processed out into the wider community. The strength of this film isn’t focusing on political narratives or daring escapes from North Korea. It concentrates on the difficulties of assimilation. The headaches of navigating new, modern worlds. In one scene we are shown the new arrivals being taught how to use credit cards, and in another how they struggle to use a ticketing system to catch a train.

It’s a Danish/Korean production directed by Frederik Sølberg and written by Sharon Choi. At times I was reminded a little of 2017’s ‘Microhabitat’ with some of the images (beautifully shot by Stephanie Stål Axelgård) echoing the film ‘Columbus’ by Kogonada,

It is a film that some people will describe as slow. And the first half is, but deliberately so, as the monotony of the laws, rules and regimentation of accepting defectors from the North come into play. But there’s a sublot which develops, maybe predictably, into a moving finale that is very tenderly and sensitively directed.

One of the year’s best.

Just saw it for the first time. Seems amazing

--

It's hilarious that the upper-class, old-money Harvard elite is portrayed as being unable to read Nietzsche properly. All the privilege, economic and cultural capital in the world, and you can't find a teacher that explains the Übermensch properly to you?

Rope (1948) is a post-WWII, post-Holocaust Kammerspiel that deconstructs bourgeois civility. The setup is brutally macabre: a murder beneath a cocktail party.

Two upper-class men, the controlling, pseudo-intellectual Brandon (John Dall) and the more fragile pianist Phillip (Farley Granger), kill their former classmate David (Dick Hogan) for no reason other than to prove that they can, that they are superior beings. They put the body in a chest, put food on top of it, and host a cocktail party.

One of the guests is their former prep-school teacher, Rupert (James Stewart), who originally gave them the idea of the Übermensch, superiority, and murder. In an extremely fascist way, they express that murder could "solve poverty." (Three years after 1945. Breathtakingly shocking. Wow.)

On the other intellectual side, David's father, Mr. Kentley (Cedric Hardwicke), defends a humanism that is appalled by this nihilism and fascism. Nazism is explicitly mentioned while they argue over drinks.

The movie quotes Freud quite a bit. There are no random actions but soubcounsious desires. Maybe Brandon and Phillip want to get caught by their former teacher, Rupert. "Look, teacher, what do you think about our project? Are you proud of us?"

Rupert, who plays detective the whole evening trying to find out what happened to David, is shocked when he sees the body and realizes what they have done. Phillip clumsily tries to threaten him with a gun, but can't really hurt him. A shot goes off, grazing Rupert's hand and leaving him bleeding.

Rupert gives a passionate monologue, stating he is ashamed of his own teachings. This makes for quite a catharsis and a return to humanism after he himself argued for that deranged Nietzscheanism just hours before.

The authority figure, so to speak, got his hand burnt when he ealized the consequences of his teaching. “Oh they acutally killed a peer instead of poor person.”

Rope can be seen as an indictment of upper-class psychology, but also of the highest forms of bourgeois education. Even if they are not explicitly mentioned, we have to think of Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, et al., drinking champagne at cocktail parties while their students might have become murderers.

The movie is sadly based on real-life events from 1924 in the US: 19-year-old Nathan Leopold and 18-year-old Richard Loeb killing 14-year-old Bobby Franks. Leopold and Loeb were gay. And so are Brandon and Phillip.

The movie couldn't show it openly because of Hays Code censorship. Cary Grant had turned down the role of Rupert because he didn't want to portray a gay man or be associated with the subtext. It is a tragic example where queer representation is intertwined with sociopathy.

Rope could also be seen as a movie about a toxic relationship between Brandon and Phillip, more sadistic and a more masochistic person. They kill David together, but Brandon is clearly the driving force, whereas Phillip says that he was always scared of him. Brandon wants Rupert's recognition. He wants to include his boyfriend in the act of killing; it should be seen as an aesthetic project they shared and can present to their mentor/father figure, who then denies them.

David is never explained as a character, but we see his good-natured father and his girlfriend, Janet (Joan Chandler). He seems to represent the "healthy heterosexual order." Meanwhile, Brandon and Phillip are portrayed as sick, and violent, treating each other horribly before ultimately being disowned by their spiritual father. Well.that’s the gay representation in 1948 I guess.

Another post got me thinking about this - everyone’s aware that modern films have fewer “sex scenes“ than in the past, but what I’m interested in is where filmmakers depict a very specific sexual appetite realistically.

Sex in films is either gross-out (either for humor reasons or for transgression) or so choreographed and sanitised as to be representive of sex at all, really, but more of a plot device to say “this is a sex scene” or more pornographically “please find this titillating”.

In real life IME sex is rarely clean and sanitised, and sometimes the act of really desiring a partner overrides a particular barrier of ‘disgust’. I’m thinking of moments where sexual desire is so strong that you’ll overlook imperfect or even kind of gross circumstances to make it happen. When films depict that, which is rare, it’s kind of transcendent because it’s universal human experience that’s barely bothered to be out to celluloid.

One director who does this well is Andrea Arnold -- her film American Honey is filled with sexual desire between our protagonist and Shia Labeouf’s uber-trashy character who looks as if he smells. And yet, she films a sex scene at golden hour (the two on a lawn, with Star removing her dirty tampon before the act) that is somehow almost moving in how it captures that desire for consuming another person overriding our very sense. Another film of hers Fish Tank has subtler examples of this.

I do hope my example makes sense; it’s just a part of life we all undergo that few directors are good at capturing and I’m interested in it (not in a creepy way, just as a matter of craft).

Rating: 7/10

Watched: September 5, 2026

At a super lean 76 minutes, I walked into this movie being pretty sure The Slumber Party Massacre exists only to give us 'teen girls' in various stages of nudity. There's nothing wrong with that because the movie's honest in its exploitation of every single woman in the movie.

But here's where it gets weird, because I didn't want to write the opener like that without making sure I wasn't imagining things, because let's be real: female nudity in horror movies throughout the 70s and 80s seemed to be the sole reason some horror movies existed in the first place.

The Slumber Party Massacre was written by a feminist and directed by a feminist. Rita Mae Brown wanted to make a movie that eviscerated slasher tropes, and Amy Holden Jones did her job in titillating audiences (and me, if I'm honest) as well as any horny male film undergrad ever could. Funnily enough, Brown wrote it as a parody while Jones was tasked with shooting it as a straight slasher flick, and it WORKS.

The women talk about baseball and the men, when confronted with danger, squirm and cower.

As far as I can tell, we're never given a reason why the killer's out there massacring anyone, let alone beautiful women, but massacre he does, and with a drill so weighty in its phallic girthiness he might as well be running around with a saw-toothed dildo the size of someone's forearm.

Again, this is not a complaint. It's an awesome realization I picked up after wanting to learn more about why such a very short movie seemed to be so well loved by so many.

Whether you look at The Slumber Party Massacre as a tits-out slasher flick and love every second of it or a feminist deconstruction of the male gaze in horror movies with added blood, we come to the same place at the same time.

This one's fun, has no fluff, and is worth the hour and a bit.

Not sure if this is a good place to post this, apologies if it isn't.

Turin Horse was a life changing film for me. I completely randomly came across it, knew nothing about it, and fell in love. I ended up watching ever Tarr film I could find. I always was tempted to try and contact him but there was always that fear of not wanting to bother people. When he passed recently it hit me harder than any filmmakers death has. A couple weeks ago, someone in a smaller film community I'm in posted their emails with Bela Tarr. Apparently he was very easy to get in contact with. It wasn't the longest exchange, but Bela was encouraging to the guy, thankful for the nice comments, he apparently joked about the length of Satantango.

The fear of bugging people is starting to give way to "what's the worse that can happen?" especially as a number of my favourite filmmakers are getting older and older and younger filmmakers are trying to move on from shorts I've loved to features.

So I'm asking: has anyone had any correspondence with filmmakers about their work? How was it? Were they receptive/nice? Did they welcome in depth discussions? Did you learn anything?

I have spent the last 72hrs absolutely unraveling the enigma that is this film. It was recommended to me on Tubi and I went into it totally blind. After my first viewing I fell in love with the storytelling, imagery and symbolic elements. It was extremely haunting and full of pure atmospheric dread.

After watching it I felt like I had some clues and wanted to discuss it. I found the internet almost completely void of any conversations surrounding it and the majority of reviews were terrible. It seemed to me though, that the film had not reached its target audience. I made a post on a couple of subreddits trying to get discussions going and it fell flat. I made a letterbox account specifically to review and encourage more people to dig deeper into this. It does not seem well received and it makes sense that it is not for everyone. However, I did not expect to be talking into a vacuum about something like this.

I left my first review posted, but I knew I was missing pieces. I watched it again and did hours of mapping out connections and working on this theory and write up. Here is what I found:

ANALYSIS: THE GLASS THICKETS OF PURGATORY

Decoding Becoming Death (2022) Through the Lens of Lynchian Trauma, Carrollian Loops, and Biblical Allegory

Introduction: The Tri-Plane Matrix of Dissociation

At face value, the independent film Becoming Death (2022) is frequently dismissed by casual viewers as a polarizing, incoherent piece of avant-garde cinema. However, a rigorous, textual deconstruction reveals an airtight, hyper-dense psychological masterpiece. The film operates on a strict tri-plane matrix built to map a mind fracturing under the weight of systematic, generational abuse. To survive an unnamable domestic reality, the protagonist's mind overlays three distinct mythologies:

The Biblical/Gnostic Plane: The house represents the Garden of Eden turned rot; the Father is the Demiurge/Satan occupying both poles of tyrannical creator and predatory serpent; the Mother acts as the corrupt High Priestess burying the sins; and the sisters invoke the dark, trapped incest-refuge of Lot's Cave (Genesis 19).

The Carrollian Dreamscape: The trauma is filtered through the nightmare logic of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (specifically channeling the uncanny, threatening tone of the 1985 televised miniseries). The house becomes a backward mirror-world where Francine is a helpless pawn marching across an 8x8 grid toward pawn promotion.

The Lynchian Trauma Blueprint: The entire structural grammar directly mirrors the Leland Palmer / BOB dynamic from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

Operating under the hermetic law of "As Above, So Below," the film demands that every horrific physical reality has a perfect, inverted metaphysical mirror. The film functions as a clinical, geometric study of a mind shattering into a localized mythological pantheon just to survive the room it is trapped in.

Part I: The Staircase Physics and the Testimony of the Rabbit

The narrative skeleton hinges entirely on a single domestic crime. During the staircase sequence that bleeds into "The Interview," the director uses precise physical blocking to establish an objective truth. The Mother (Claudine) goes upstairs while Francine remains downstairs. The Father (Ralph) ascends the stairs. Off-screen, he falls, landing at the bottom already stabbed and dead.

Francine physically could not have struck the blow. In the physical realm, the Mother murdered the Father and instantly screamed to frame Francine. This is the ultimate, toxic culmination of generational gaslighting—forcing the daughter to bear the psychological guilt for a murder she didn't commit, as well as the destruction of the family.

Because the Mother manifests on the subconscious plane as The White Rabbit, the cryptic letter read during the trial chapter acts as her literal, encoded courtroom testimony. It isn't nonsense; it is her frantic attempt to escape accountability. Lines heavy with pronoun confusion—such as "An obstacle that came between / Him, and ourselves, and it"—outline her deep resentment of Francine's presence in the household. The poem’s warning, "A secret, kept from all the rest, / Between yourself and me," is the definitive structural blueprint of the family’s enforced silence and weaponized piety.

Part II: The Lynchian Identity: Hank as a Psychological Phantom

The biological Father does not exist as a living human being on the physical plane of the film. He is a ghost, an invisible, omnipresent predator looming behind a locked door. To survive this horror, Francine’s psyche dissociates him into a complete pantheon of shifting masks: Hank, Ulysses, The Caterpillar, Dr. Jacoby/The Mad Hatter, Lot, and the Jabberwocky (Satan).

It is vital to explicitly clarify: Hank is not a real person. He is a pure psychological manifestation of the Father. He is the exact cinematic translation of the Leland Palmer / BOB paradigm. Leland wears the mask of BOB to commit his acts of abuse while forcing his victim to dissociate; in Becoming Death, the Father wears the mask of "Hank"—the romantic, safe boyfriend in the woods—to trick Francine into a false Garden of Eden.

The Sleep Paralysis Mechanism: This explains the horrifying scene where the Bloody Mary figure violently chokes Francine in her sleep. It is the precise psychological mirror to Laura Palmer’s bedroom terrors. During the trauma of physical assault, Francine experiences a complete freeze-response (tonic immobility). Her psyche creates the terrifying, bleeding specter to rationalize the physical sensation of suffocation and helplessness without forcing the child to look at her biological father's face. It is an internal alarm system desperately trying to wake the ego up.

The Cheshire Cat Execution: In Wonderland, the executioner cannot behead the Cheshire Cat because it has no body—it is a floating grin, the ultimate symbol of a disembodied, dissociative mask. Francine violently subverts the rules of Wonderland to destroy her abuser: she beheads Ulysses, leaving only the torso behind, permanently stripping the phantom of its grin, its voice, and its psychological control.

Part III: The Ultimate Axis: The Psychology of the Bloody Woman

As captured on the film's haunting promotional poster, The Bloody Woman is the ultimate structural axis of the entire movie—simultaneously functioning as the supreme protagonist and antagonist. Visually styled like a weeping church statue of the Virgin Mary crying blood, she is a psychological monster birthed directly from the Mother’s crushing Catholic conditioning.

Francine is never truly afraid of her because the Bloody Woman is not an outside demon; she is the localized quarantine zone of Francine's remaining sanity. Because Francine cannot fight back as a human daughter in the waking world without completely shattering her brain, her mind builds an autonomous, blood-crying goddess to hold the violence for her. She operates with absolute dual sovereignty across the planes:

On the Antagonist Plane (The Internalized Devil): She carries the internalized, self-destructive rage of the household. She chokes the mortal ego, attacks the self, and screams the violent, hateful scripts ("I hate you, I'll kill you") that the parents used to break Francine down. She acts as a tyrannical shadow trying to destroy the weak, human version of "Alice."

On the Protagonist Plane (The Bleeding Madonna / White Queen): She is an uncompromising protective shield. This is explicitly confirmed when Francine hears the Bloody Woman’s voice cutting through her mind the exact second she kisses "Hank" in the woods. The Bloody Woman breaks the dissociation, screaming to alert Francine that the safe "boyfriend" is actually the Wolf.

She is the instrument of absolute cosmic justice. She forces the mortal pawn across the chessboard, triggers the execution of the mother, and orchestrates the transition into the tunnel.

Part IV: Surnames, Garmonbozia, and the Secret Diary

The official credits expose the deep bloodline contamination of the house. Francine and her sister carry the strictly matriarchal surname Claudette to push the Father out. Meanwhile, the Mother (Claudine) and the Boyfriend (Harry) share the surname Rogers—textually binding them as a singular unit (husband and wife). This reveals that the bathtub scene where the Mother kills Harry is her executing the Father. She always knew exactly who the monster was; this was never a secret.

When Ulysses arrives at the door muttering the depraved, corrupted innuendo about "eating Claudine's cherry pie," he strips away the innocence of the classic Lynchian diner motif, turning it into a symbol of domestic decay. This decay culminates in The Last Meal. The "meat-heavy" dinner of worm-ridden soil pods and ramen eaten from an apple-red forbidden bowl is the physical manifestation of pain and sorrow—the literal equivalent of Lynch's Garmonbozia. The parents are actively harvesting and feeding on Francine's suffering. Francine swallows the total weight of the household’s sins, using this toxic communion as a Carrollian "Eat Me" growth catalyst to fuel her final evolution.

Just as Laura Palmer left The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer as the surviving evidence of her abuse, Francine leaves her Resume in purgatory. The piece of paper is a dual document: a resume on the surface, but a suicide note underneath. The single reference listed on it is Diana.

Part V: The Twin Dianas, Yama/Yami, and Banging on the Glass

The parking lot by the tunnel functions as the Gateway to Hell/The Black Lodge. Here, we meet Margaret, who represents The Caterpillar perched on an empty shopping cart. She smokes cigarettes and speaks vulgarly because she is the raw, cynical version of the organism that has already broken out of the family cocoon, destined to eventually become a butterfly.

Margaret is the structural equivalent of Maddy Ferguson (Laura’s identical doppelgänger cousin) carrying the grief of the physical world. The film utilizes a precise aesthetic inversion under As Above, So Below: the Bloody Woman wears all white with red tears (metaphysical wrath/Lodge Angels), while Margaret wears all black with running makeup like black tears (earthly mourning). Together, they form the complete identity of the goddess Diana (and her domestic counterpart, Alice’s cat Dinah), presiding over the crossroads. Their tragic love story operates as a gender-bent rendition of the Vedic tale of Yama and Yami—the primordial twins of death and creation bound by taboo boundaries.

This ties directly into the terrifying mirror sequence borrowed from the 1985 Alice miniseries. Just as Alice presses herself flat against the looking glass, frantically banging and screaming at parents who walk around completely deaf to her presence, Francine is trapped on the "wrong side of the glass" in purgatory. Agent Dale Cooper functions as the calm, time-obsessed inverse White Rabbit patrolling the corridors of this chasm, recording his logs to Diane (Diana).

Part VI: The Mathematical Alignment of 8 and 12

The cosmic lattice of the film is bound by structural numerology that spans across all planes:

The Number 12: It represents cosmic order and legal trial. In Twin Peaks, Laura’s diary begins on her 12th birthday, charting her descent. In Alice, Chapter 12 is "Alice's Evidence"—the literal courtroom trial scene where the White Rabbit reads the letter. In Becoming Death, the address 282 sums mathematically to 12 (2+8+2), cementing "The Interview" as a metaphysical courtroom trial.

The Number 8: The final address is Unit 8. Visually, the number 8 represents the Ouroboros—the infinite, looping timeline where the Bloody Woman enters the tunnel at the beginning and Francine enters at the end. In Twin Peaks, the number 8 is the loop generated by Phillip Jeffries in Room 8, mapping the gateway to the lodge. On the chessboard of Through the Looking-Glass, the 8th row is the line of pawn promotion. Unit 8 is where Francine’s mortal pawn identity is completely dissolved so her ascension into a Goddess (Yama) can take place.

The Wardrobe of Death: This numeric ascension is physically executed when Francine strips off her mortal garments, cleanses herself outside, and shifts specifically into the Black Fur Coat. By shedding her human skin, she is discarding the weak pawn identity of "Alice." Wrapping herself in the dark fur solidifies her transformation into Diana / Dinah (the hunting cat) and wraps her in the literal cloak of Yama (Death). It is a visual manifestation of stepping through the dark curtains of the Black Lodge—a physical burial of the ego at the bottom of the rabbit hole before she takes her final place at the crossroads.

Conclusion: Pawn Promotion and Extreme Unction

By committing suicide in her car at the tunnel entrance, Francine completes the alchemical ransom. She absorbs the blood so her sister, the "Pearl" (Margaret), can inherit a cleared board. As the house collapses, Francine frantically chants the "Stations of the Cross" to map her martyrdom, leading directly to the film's final spoken words: "Extreme Unction" (The Catholic Sacrament of Last Rites). The soul is permanently severed from the corrupt flesh, the time loop closes, the cosmic trial is settled, and the butterfly is finally free to fly out of the thicket.

There are still many more Easter Eggs and embodiments/manifestations of these doppelgänger characters across the three parrallel planes. Almost everyy word, every name, every movement has a meaning that connects everything together.

Theres also a short film on the director's YouTube channel called "The Satan" that is directly entwined into this logic. His name is Alexander Henderson and the YouTube channel is Alexanderthetitan. There's lots of great stuff on there, but this is his opus and an absolute hidden gem. I have done nothing but think about this for three days straight and write the essay of my life, so hopefully it gets someone to watch this.

Does anyone want to discuss this movie now? 🔥

Last night I rewatched my favorite movie of all, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

For the first time I’ve finally made it over the hump. By that I mean, I haven’t seen it in years but I’ve always felt like a Cameron - afraid, unsure, lacking confidence. But for the first time ever, I identify with Ferris. I’m no longer afraid, I take risks, if plans fail I keep fighting. The fact I no longer identify with Cameron while still understanding him is a massive milestone for me and tells me I’m in the right direction. I moved to NYC, I’m starting a business, creating allies. I’m confident, assured, and learned to take the films lesson to heart. I highly suggest the film on Blu-Ray. It's one of the most beautiful movies ever made not only in terms of message and content and story but also visuals.

Speakie-de-English?!

I recently watched this for the first time and am shocked it didn't get more love from audiences and critics at the time it was released. Was that because Jim Carrey was playing gay? Could the universe not handle that?

His protagonist's sexual orientation aside, the role is an absolute perfect fit for Carrey, whose best screen characters to date, in my opinion, either possess near-irrational self-confidence or an existential emptiness that speaks of unresolved trauma. In real-life ex-con Steven Jay Russell, Carrey finally has a part with both those qualities.

Russell proves himself to be an unreliable narrator from the start, and so we are already conditioned to not take what we're seeing at face value. First we think he's a cop and then it turns out he's crooked. We're introduced to his wife, little girl, and church-based upbringing, but then it turns out Russell's closeted.

What is clear is that he's a guy with unresolved trauma, and all the illegal activities and the double life Steven indulges in? It's like he does it in order to avoid ever stopping and having to process all of his pain. Now that may sound deep and serious, but the movie itself is also frequently very funny, including moments of humor based on Carrey's wild physicality (as is entirely appropriate).

But what I must give the filmmakers credit for is despite having a comedic actor whose play style can be the center around which entire cinematic vehicles are constructed, in this case, the performance is built around the story instead. As Russell perpetuates an increasing number of fraudulent acts and other white collar crimes, there are opportunities for intense, downward-tilted head stares so his eyes resemble two headlights driving straight at you--ie, the whole Jim Carrey thing.

Now I'll admit that version of the actor is far from my favorite as it's often reserved for playing antagonists. But I was fine with it here as the "unsheathed-id" persona is frequently punching upwards, whether at the dehumanizing prison system or corporate America. Indeed, once he gets on a roll, the only instance in which Russell arguably isn't doing that involves a minor character nicknamed "The Screecher".(a scene I found uncomfortable since they clearly had some kind of mental illness).

Carrey also has space to play the almost-milquetoast nice-guy persona that dates back to LIAR, LIAR. It's established early on that he's a good dad and seems genuinely guilty for having to break the heart of his inevitable ex-wife, played by Leslie Mann. If Russell's also a criminal, he's given enough depth that we can accept him as not necessarily a bad person, just a flawed one.

This review's running a bit long, so in closing, just want to point out how great the rest of the cast is, especially Ewan McGregor, who's convincing as someone absolutely secure in his own skin (which may be part of what Russell finds so attractive about him).

I also appreciated Mann for her depiction of a spouse who really, really tries to support her husband through his increasingly erratic behavior. And despite appearing in just a few short scenes, I thought Rodrigo Santoro was terrific as one of Russell's other lovers who initially seems like the young eye-candy piece, but turns out to be wiser about a lot of things than Steven, including about Steven himself.