March 2023 Favorite Watches & Supercut Recap

That month I rediscovered the genius of Jean Renoir, had my first encounter with the feminist masterpiece Jeanne Dielman and certified Vampyr as an all-time great horror film.

[posted to IG on March 28, 2023]

March Recap:

Had such a range of genres and tones in the movies I watched this month that I decided to simplify things because I had no idea how else to cut everything together. I’m still experimenting with how I want to format these, and honestly, I’m not mad at this one with just the one clip from each. Certainly makes things easier to edit when I don’t have seventy 3-5 second clips to mash together.

Not the most exciting month for recommendations as I went super hard on the old shit but it was a blast for me to revisit some faves from Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, and Carl Theodor Dreyer in an attempt to see what still holds up as a masterpiece - spoiler alert: much of it does. And after about 7 years of being very mewarm on revered Japanese filmmaking icon Yasujirō Ozu, the beauty of his work has finally started opening up to me, and it’s quite exhilarating in a way that’s hard to explain. It’s that click of finally getting it. It’s a good feeling.

Some other highlights include seeing influential Senegalese artist Ousmane Sembène’s groundbreaking short film Borom Sarret (1963); Chantal Akerman’s feminist slow cinema domestic nightmare Jeanne Dielman… (1975), which recently made waves by taking the top spot on Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time list (a very big deal); the incredible fucking disco scene from the 1980 slasher Prom Night; and finally catching that dang ol’ Marcel the Shell (2021) adaptation that everyone on Letterboxd has been raving about the last few years. It’s hella adorable and very moving, and I always love Jenny Slate. And also shout out Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) which still has one of the greatest movie endings of all time 🥲

Supercut song credit goes to the electronic duo Hypernatural for their vibey but invigorating track “Spirit Walk” off their 2022 self-titled album (which made my 2022 Best Of honorable mentions. Very vibrant and playful album, go listen).

Top Ten Favorite Watches of the Month:

The astounding spectacle of the battle scenes is some of cinema’s biggest technical achievements in the early 30s.

French poetic realism will never not turn me into a dreamy-eyed schoolchild perched in front of the tv with my chin in my hands.

Part police procedural, part crime thriller, a lot of allusions to the horrors of a rapidly spreading Nazi ideology that made director Fritz Lang have to flee Germany following the film’s release - it wouldn’t publicly be shown again in the country until 1961.

Ozu’s framing during the train tracks breakup sequence is fucking magical and made my soul ache.

A bit one-dimensional and the ending fumbles the bag, but goddamn found footage movies get under my skin. Any horror movie that makes me paranoid of my own home is a good horror movie in my book.

A masterclass in subtle tonal and structural shifts, the slow cinema domestic nihilism of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman might be the quietest nightmare ever put to film.

Michel Simon’s Boudu walked so that Danny Devito’s Frank Reynolds could run. Just a sloppy anarchic mess of a human.

Moreau feels like a Hannibal Lecter prototype in how quietly terrifying he is, full of intellect, class, and stone-cold criminal insanity. The most chilling part of mad scientists is how absolutely they believe in the legitimacy of what they're doing, no matter how impractical it is to the realm of science.

The climax of Renoir’s twisted and cynical dark comedy still hits like a sledgehammer gut-punch with its immaculately crafted tension.

Dreyer basically set the template for modern atmospheric horror with the potently dreamlike Vampyr. Plot and characters hardly matter when the mood and imagery are this fucking masterful. An essential film from one of cinema’s most essential artists.