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SMC Notebooks.
Our LetterboxdFilm essays and reviews by our community, talented writers, moviemakers, and founder & programmer Craig Hammill — a notebook for serious cinema, spanning the canon and the newly discovered.
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Film essays and reviews by our community, talented writers, moviemakers, and founder & programmer Craig Hammill — a notebook for serious cinema, spanning the canon and the newly discovered.
All Essays
THE GENERAL is one of the all-time great action comedies. And from it comes almost all great American action ever since.
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It was only a matter of time until Luis Buñuel, a moviemaker with a foot fetish, made a movie about a leg amputee.
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One of those bat-sh@t crazy movies that has become beloved by rep cinema audiences everywhere, POSSESSION is ridiculous and glorious.
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Jean Luc Godard is to cinema what James Joyce is to literature. He blew the whole thing open and changed the form.
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SOUND OF FALLING is a movie of tremendous daring, real cinema, mystery, pain, psychology.
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One of the reasons one should watch all kinds of movies with no thought to snobbery is that some of the most genius cinema pops up in ghettoized genres like horror and B-movie science fiction.
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A movie of bracing emotional violence, William Wyler's THE HEIRESS is another proof that classic Hollywood was making movies as bold (if not sometimes more bold) than anything being made today.
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LAURA is one of those movies with so many intriguing directions into which it could go. The direction it does go in is entertaining and moving, properly noirish and fatalistically romantic.
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Wajda's film captures a great rhythm, an essential musicality as it follows an anti-Communist Polish fighter across a day and night involving assassination attempts, a love affair, and the weight of an entire generation's grief.
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