May 2023 Favorite Watches & Supercut Recap

That month I revisited some cinema titans and had three new movies crack my top 100 of all time.

[posted to IG on May 30, 2023]

May Recap:

I watched three first-time-viewing 10/10 movies all of last year and now watched three just this month. I’m not sure if I’ve been lucking out on selections or have just been in a better, more receptive mind state, but it’s been an exhilarating year for movie-watching. I also revisited a trifecta of film history monuments in The Rules of The Game (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), and Citizen Kane (1941). None of them were the 10/10s, but all three are still phenomenal, and The Rules of the Game and La bête humaine (1938) helped certify the French mastermind Jean Renoir as my favorite filmmaker of the 1930s. And lastly, the cult-classic hype around the dark comedy Heathers (1988) is real: check it out.

Supercut song credit goes to TOKiMONSTA (aka Jennifer Lee) for the track “Rouge” from her 2017 LP, Lune Rouge.

Top Ten Favorite Watches of the Month:

Great music, great message, great visuals - all David Byrne.

Renoir marries poetic realism and proto-noir to create a film that’s as dreamy and romantic as it is cynical and grim.

As with any Chaplin, the story can be a bit choppy, but the big speech still slaps more than nearly anything before or after it.

The early Soviet filmmakers were so skilled and visually inventive that even their propaganda movies contained more thoughtful artistry than other filmmakers’ entire careers.

So quintessential to modern film grammar in the West that it’s basically its own film class.

One of the all-time greatest farces, a searingly comedic examination of class, and Renoir’s most formally adventurous film up to this point.

A hilarious, highly quotable, subversive dark comedy that would help launch teenage cast members Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, and Shannon Doherty to stardom.

Achingly human, a profound emotional odyssey with first-rate writing, directing, and acting. It’s everything you could want from an atmospheric slow-burn drama.

Though everyone knows the Wes Anderson aesthetic, the wit and whimsy of his stories often overshadow his stunning technical proficiency. On The French Dispatch, he lets his filmmaking take the front seat and delivers an endlessly bold formal masterpiece that displays why he deserves to be named with the likes of Kubrick, Coppola, or the many New Wave filmmakers The French Dispatch is indebted to.

Left me frozen in my seat long after the credits stopped rolling. A despairingly bleak political allegory of the late 60s revolutionary movements; a film that’s lost no impact or importance over the years.