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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
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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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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