Hello all,
I’ve been meaning to get to this for a little while, and now that I have a nice little corpus of short reviews in the form of film lists, I’m sharing links to four lengthy, substantive, hearty lists I’ve written over the past month for an online website, Taste of Cinema, that specializes in cinema classics, art-house productions, and foreign cinema. Even if you don’t pay attention to the list order (some of the lists aren’t ordered in terms of film quality any way), the text provides quick-and-dirty bite-sized analysis of films, and for the sake of seasonal cheer, mostly horror films at that. Obviously, most of these films are works I either like or love, several of which are transcendent masterpieces of the form, and some of which you’ll note have much longer reviews already on the site. Nevertheless, here they are for your pleasure. Enjoy!
20 Best Horror Films Made by Non-Horror Directors
20 Best Black-and-White Horror Films of the Sound Era
And the outlier for the month, but a personal favorite, the 25 Best Disney Animated Feature Length Films
Have fun,
Jake
Edited
Update late 2018:
Update late 2019: Looking back on some old Joaquin Phoenix films with Joker raising such a ruckus, and I’m torn on Her after a six-year gap in viewing. The film certainly feels less monumental than it did six years ago, but that’s also a show of strength: quietly but demonstrably, critically but not-cynically, the film exhibits curiosity about relationships, identity, and the world, and its lack of capital-case textures and showboating maneuvers suggest the subtlety of its craft more than Importance ever could. That said, I’m less certain that Her’s curlicued production design affectations, while kept in check from garish Burtonesque grotesqueness or Wes Anderson-esque excess by Hoyte von Hoytema’s phenomenally diffuse, naturalistic cinematography, are actually the auto-critical gestures the film so clearly thinks them to be. The film’s look is still pointed, and still effective, but at times, it encroaches on the very mannered twee-ness that the style otherwise so thoughtfully diagnoses about modernity, so much so that the film seems cloistered and soul-bearing at once. Is it thoughtfully contradictory for the film to lean so clearly into its very object of critique, as though swirling around in its own critical gaze, or is it simply too-cute by half?
I Walked with a Zombie was the second film Val Lewton produced once given complete control of RKO’s horror unit, and it was released only a year after Cat People, his most famed horror film. Given this, one might expect a retread, but I Walked with a Zombie is certainly not the film anyone then or now would be expecting. A tension seethes in the air and grasps all, but the film doesn’t demand in the way a work like Cat People is so tersely constructed to fight for our attention. Absent are the soul-deep colors of Cat People which lighted up the screen with black energy. And in place of the rampant diluted German Expressionism of American horror throughout the ’30s and ’40s, all caught up in harsh and angular nightmares, we have something that more closely approximates a hazy dream, a curious cross between an English period drama and a work of French impressionism that centers mournful, elegiac long takes and has room enough for lost secrets deviously begging to get out . It is, above all, wholly distant from anything resembling horror logic, and it is all the more fascinating for it.
Update in late 2019 with the release of Dark Fate: The glum and more self-consciously morose later sequels track, recode, and needlessly convolute this film’s elegant, inescapable trudge toward oblivion, shading and sharding Cameron’s original vision in various ways, but they all completely miss the original’s brilliance: its sense of soul-death. Nominally an action film but far divorced from the self-amused tone of the Schwarzenegger pictures that were in the can as soon as this one made a fortune, The Terminator is as implacable and monosyllabic as its namesake: a blood-and-guts slasher film in a metallic overcoat, and one with significantly less Pavlovian satisfaction at the death it deals. Brutal simplicity at its finest, The Terminator essays a dystopic future that ultimately, tragically, realizes its far-flung visions of eventual catastrophe already came to pass in the present while it wasn’t looking. How far this franchise has fallen …
Martin Scorsese’s lived-in film adaptation of The Band’s legendary, star-studded farewell concert, cheekily titled “The Last Waltz”, is wholly at odds with the fundamental logic of the conventional concert film, and it is all the more fascinating for it. At the eve of their dissolution, Scorsese chose to film the Band warts and all. He captures, more than anything, their own distance from the music they no longer necessarily want to call home. You can feel his love for the energy of raw music, yet he uses this energy to capture a fundamental malaise. His camera becomes their most knowing fan, giving the film a live, human physicality even as it deals in the deadened decay of men too tired to care anymore. The Rolling Stones’ documentary Gimme Shelter, itself fairly stunning, is haunting for the way a single tragedy intervened and permeated the celluloid of the whole film. Here, however, we come to understand something more deadening: the perpetual tension of joy and melancholy of life on the road, something a tragedy wouldn’t so much break-up as become one small portion of. On this tension between the lively and the embalmed, the film presents a fascinating vision of humanity and performance equaled by few films. 
The Long Take 