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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

Sometimes you just need a little 1970's Estonian sci-fi.
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THE SECRET AGENT is a movie told in ellipsis. A cinema meant to be "read between the lines."
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Cinema diarist Jonas Mekas' 1968 WALDEN feels like the avant garde movie equivalent of Jack Kerouac's 1950's beatnik classic ON THE ROAD.
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When you experience a towering creative work like Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA, you sometimes start to try to figure out what sets it apart.
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Some movies work on the sheer force of their conviction.
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This is a moving, deeply thought out piece of cinema.
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COVER-UP, for this writer, is the first necessary movie of 2025.
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This writer found Ukrainian moviemaker Alexander Dovzhenko's 1930 released EARTH inscrutable. In a glorious way.
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This is a movie that hits you different once you have children.
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