Raul Marques Pro

Favorites: standout recent watches

THE BEST FILMS OF 2024
(a video by me)

Favorite films

  • Bull Durham
  • L'Atalante
  • Same Old West
  • Songs

All
  • Bride Wars

    ★★½

  • Arzé

    ★★★★

  • Final Destination Bloodlines

    ★★★½

  • O Jogo da Vida

    ★★★½

More
Bride Wars

2009

★★½ Watched

A cultural relic. Impossible not to feel that since its release Western/American society has made some meaningful strides forward and Hollywood filmmaking took several strides backward.

Arzé

2024

★★★★ Liked Watched

An urban adventure equal parts desperate and captivating. Feels like it could take place almost anywhere in the Global South, where by necessity or negligence informality permeates every facet of society, while still conveying its Lebanese specificity. Strikingly blunt about its melodrama, as if softening the blows of reality wasn't worth the effort, with the title-character constantly on the verge of tears, yet defiant in its refusal to be solely defined by anguish.

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Mistress America

2015

★★★★½ Liked 8

[dancing]

Brooke: What's going on in college?

Tracy: I don't know, everyone's really excited about this frozen yogurt machine at the student center.

B: I watched my mother die.

T: What?

B: I was with my mother while she died.

T: I don't know any dead people.

B: That's cool about the frozen yogurt machine. Everyone I love dies.

Le Bonheur

1965

★★★★★ Liked 19

Me, watching a Godard film with unorthodox editing: fuck off you pretentious asshole. We get it, that's not the established cinematic language and that's not the type of (non)narrative commercial movies tend to be interested in, but is there something more to it? Or are you just doing it for some vague-ish intellectual reason to seem disruptive? Or worse, because you think it's cool?

Me, watching a Varda film with (somewhat similar) unorthodox editing: nothing in the history of the…