It is said that once a pilot has issued the MAYDAY distress signal three times, the probability of survival is almost zero.
106 films on the list. 85 I have rated, 55 of them five stars, and 19 I wrote something about. 1960 to 2026.
rating
showing 106 of 106 films
It opens as self-acceptance and an inner reckoning with Black desire under a white gaze, then turns into a fight scene that comes out of nowhere and a racial struggle told in cliches. The music is genuinely great though, and the concept and the images are first rate.
My favourite shot is the moment Sue and Elisabeth look at each other, because it was the first time while watching that I understood they are not the same person, and maybe the first time Sue and Elisabeth understood it too.
We like to think the soul, or consciousness, or memory is what makes us who we are. As long as I am still myself, we let ourselves damage the body and chase beauty too far. But it is the embodied experience that ends up making us, especially now, in the age of AI. Even with all of my memories loaded into it, it is not me. I am me, inside my body.
The film uses an extreme torture of the body to remind us that anxiety about beauty is bad, and that as things move on and we keep learning we can find a gentler middle. The overdone ending is a reminder that in a post-feminist age we should stop shaming ourselves for not being confident, since none of us is about to turn into a monster and spray blood across a stage.
Plenty of films fold a national wound into a small family story. This one still lands as something rare, because it holds the sincerity of the feeling against the weakness of the people and against an ending society made unavoidable.
What will kill people is not the immigrants, or the virus, or racism. The structure above them all is the bear in the night. The old generation is already dead. We are left to solve it ourselves and to carry what we do about it.
The moment we argue over whether to practise identity politics or nationalism, we have already lost the ability to have a real democratic conversation, whichever way the answer goes.
What moves me in First Cow is how deftly it shows time burying us. For most of us, while we are young, time does not wreck us, does not set the body aching. It covers us in dust. We get fixed at some point, and finitude gives off an infinite light, and that moment is also the moment we are buried. Everything after it is a footnote, a commentary, a postscript or history.
How do you end a film like this without it feeling like it is asking for your pity? I do not have an answer either. So Sean Baker gets full marks.
The suspended ending is somehow full of hope, because we know what a cynic Lanthimos is.
Sincere and moving. It made me cry.
This film brings Janet Planet to mind. The insights into a child's interiority and lived experience are remarkably delicate, and they require not just a profound attunement to life and emotion but the formal mastery to transmute that sensibility into cinematic language.
Janet Planet captures the density of time: that sticky, seemingly interminable stretch of summer. Boredom, in itself, is a quiet romanticism. You have not yet learned to measure your existence against objectives.
El Sur, on the other hand, dwells in spatial darkness, hunting for a source of light under constraint, knowing you can keep living as long as there is any light at all. It is in this exact drift that we grasp how irreducibly complex people are, and slowly become more whole ourselves.
It is about the past, a re-enactment and a remembering of a great era of cinema. It is about the present, a deep reading of society, a serious critique and a sincere affection. It is about the future, and where the loop takes us.
I thought it was very good.
Anora breaks your heart, and the real thing is more crushing still. Sean Baker is already shielding us.
Making Little Miss Sunshine in 2024, basically.
A neat little A24 dessert.
Talk to Me shows that A24 has settled into its own taste in picking films: small, precise, repressed, arty. Anyone can make a seance horror film, but A24's is not like the others. It is as if you asked them for scrambled eggs with tomato and they insist on adding pepper and basil.
Every setup pays off cleverly, though the logic does not quite hold, like a beautifully made puzzle box that forgets a smart player will simply smash it open to get at what is inside.
They keep searching, they never get anything, and they have forgotten what they were looking for.
A third world war that can never be started.
The score over the final standoff is what earned this a place among the horror films that move me.
Nothing here answers to that. Try fewer words, or clear the filters.