Movies

The Guardian spoke with genius Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr about his 2011 retirement and why he's teaching 20-somethings about art in Sarajevo.

Tarr's films are not to everyone's tastes, but I find them rather captivating. It is not hyperbole to say that absolutely no one makes or has made films like Tarr. I have not seen them all, but my favorite of those I have is The Turin Horse, which was his final film. It is about two and a half hours long and contains only 29 cuts. Long shots are his signature shot. Satantango, perhaps his most famous film, is seven and a half hours long.

If you'd rather not invest such time into one of Tarr's films blindly, here's a 40 minute essay that offers a decent introduction to his work. Below that I've linked two you can currently watch for free.

The Turin Horse is online in its entirety, as is Werckmeister Harmonies.

Via Metafilter.

You ever have a line of dialogue in your head and you can't remember what film it's from?

Enter PlayPhrase, a search engine for dialogue. It managed to properly source every phrase I threw at it:

"It's no longer your film," from Mulholland Drive.

"For me, the action is the juice," from Heat.

"Poured out like water on the ground," from The Thin Red Line.

"I'm quietly judging you," from Magnolia.

"Because you only have two forms of expression: silence and rage," from Midnight Run.

Pretty impressive. Not sure what it says about me that those are the phrases that came to mind, though.

"Taking the Highest Average score from each year (with over 1k reviews) let's see how different the Academy Awards canon would look if Letterboxd chose the Oscars' winners for best film. This list excludes Documentaries, Shorts , Concert films and Limited Series."

I agree with much of this.

I disagree most with 2007. There's no question in my mind that No Country For Old Men is a better film than There Will Be Blood.