I organized an AMA/Q&A with legendary filmmaker/screenwriter Nicolas Winding Refn. He has previously directed films/series Drive, Only God Forgives, Bronson, The Neon Demon, Pusher trilogy, Copenhagen Cowboy, Too Old To Die Young, Valhalla Rising, and more.

It's live here now in r/movies for anyone interested in asking a question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1v3mkcv/i_am_nicolas_winding_refn_director_of_drive_the/

He will be back at 4:45 PM ET today to answer questions. I recommend asking in advance. Please ask there, not here. All questions are much appreciated!

His new film, Her Private Hell, premiered at Cannes in May and is out in theaters via Neon this weekend. It stars Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton.

Thank you :)

His verification/proof photo: https://i.imgur.com/741dTf5.png

Just watched Memento. It is probably the only movie that had me googling its structure and story just to answer the million questions it left in my mind after that climax.

First of all, what a mind-bending movie. I have never seen something so sophisticated and complex, yet so structurally simple. It is so gripping that you cannot afford to skip a single scene, or you will have to start over from the beginning. But you wouldn't want to skip it anyway, because it is relentlessly engaging.

A guy with short-term memory loss causing this much absolute mayhem... Nolan was truly operating on another level from day one. Nolan showcases his brilliance in this two-hour runtime so convincingly. All the mind-boggling direction of his later career stems directly from Memento.

The way he wrote, shot, and directed this film is nothing short of brilliant. I miss this era of Nolan; he went from making uncompromising art films to straight-up blockbusters, but his distinctive style is still deeply rooted here.

It is brilliantly acted, written, edited, and directed. Guy Pearce embodies Leonard so completely that it doesn't even look like he is acting.

The screenplay is a paradox: incredibly confusing, yet mechanically simple. It is essentially two movies running back and forth. Nolan shot two different timelines with the same cast, and the way they perfectly converge in the middle proves how special this film is. I love how the backstory is shot in black-and-white, moving forward in chronological order, while the present timeline is in color, moving backward in reverse chronology.

The dialogue is brilliant. Not too heavy, not overly deep, just pure and functional. I usually get bothered by heavy character monologues, but here, they feel entirely necessary. The internal monologues act as a character of their own.

I love how Nolan subtly establishes that nothing is what it seems. First, he shows us Natalie, Teddy, and even Burt blatantly lying to Leonard. Then, after the climax, it becomes obvious that Leonard has been used countless times before. Each time, Teddy lies to him, Leonard executes the target, wears the victim's clothes, drives their car, and everything resets. There is just too much space on his body for another lie.

I believe Leonard gradually kept tattooing himself as his target changed and he continued to be used. He was fed fake details each time, just like Burt kept resetting his motel rooms. The poor guy is trapped in a permanent loop. I personally don't think this was his first time executing someone, and I firmly believe the "real" killer was dealt with long ago.

That amazing ending left me with a million questions that I just need to get out of my head. The list goes on, and even the answers to these questions are highly debatable. After watching a movie like this, the answers might not even feel like the truth.

I think Leonard wanted to exist in a lie to run from the devastating truth: his wife survived the attack, and he was the one who accidentally killed her. He needed the lie to give his trivial life meaning. If he truly put an end to the killer and tattooed it, his quest would be over. What would be the purpose of his life then? So, he chose to survive with confabulation and conditioning.

I haven't been this mesmerized by a thriller in a long time. It offers no catharsis, no relief, just questions. It is an unmissable masterpiece that takes hours just to decode. By the end, you know everything, and yet, you still know absolutely nothing at all.

I thought the Odyssey was excellent. An impressive spectacle. Great acting. Gripping pace. And some fascinating themes about time and memory and the malleability of narrative.

Also, i thought it was uncanny how Nolan’s style and interests compliment the Odyssey so well. Especially his use of fleeting imagery that keeps recurring. A horse in flames. An innocent face in the grip of war. A modest ship on the wine dark sea.

I had a great time. And when it got to the final reflection scene between Damon and Hathaway, through the arras, tying all of the themes of the film together, about war and the erosion of culture, the noxious decay of systematic evil, our cruelty to strangers.

“10 years we’ve been on this fucking beach.”

All really brilliant.

But my enjoyment of the film was so bothered by the lack of meaningful gore.

This may come off trifling. But gore is so essential to Homer’s narrative style. In the illiad there are gruesome, meticulous descriptions of gore on every page. In the odyssey, it’s a bit more subdued. But you still have the cyclops smashing ppl’s brains out on the floor of the cave instead of just mutely stepping on them.

Where this bugged me the worst was the slaughter of the suitors scene. In the book, that scene plays out like the kill bill crazy 88 fight. Blood geysers everywhere. There’s descriptions about how the whole room is caked in blood.

This is not just like a knee jerk interest in gore for gore’s sake. But thematically, the arc of the plot feels unsatisfying without it. the slaughter scene in Odyssey is like the culmination, the penultimate moment. You wait the whole book for this moment and when it happens it is insane and explosive and red.

In the movie, the scene felt like a rip off of john wick. Just cheap and underwhelming. Not only that, but so unconvincing on an anatomical level. You’ve got all these people getting chopped up with axes and swords and arrows hitting arteries. And there’s no blood anywhere? Come on.

I get that this is an expensive movie and you want a lot of people to see it and Nolan is not really a gore person. But not having any blood here felt like a weak capitulation. Or like a return to the Hays Code. Even worse, it neglected one of the most distinct and visceral aesthetic elements in Homer.

It's difficult to talk about Carlito's Way without Scarface being mentioned, and not without reason - both are Brian DePalma films, and both star Al Pacino, and the two films are often compared and contrasted.

But what if that’s the point? What if the similarities are intentional, in that DePalma is intentionally wanting to draw comparisons between the two films. And lets go further, what if Brian DePalma is actively responding, apologising, deconstructing and disavowing the influence and fame of Scarface and Tony Montana through Carlito’s Way and Carlito Brigante. That DePalma was as tired of Scarface’s legacy as Carlito was of his?

Any mature reading of Scarface would conclude that it’s a cautionary tale. That Montana was self-destructive, flawed, and highly dangerous, his ending inevitable. As Elvira says, “can’t you see what we’re becoming. We’re losers.” But a common takeaway from the film – magnified and amplified by the hip hop generation that gave the film a cult following – is that Tony Montana is someone to aspire to be. Someone to emulate. Someone who took no sh*t from anybody, who clawed his way from the bottom of the barrel to becoming the king of an empire. He embodies the ultimate "rags-to-riches" story, and is adored for his unapologetic ambition, raw courage, and extreme self-confidence. Many viewers see him as an underdog who defied the odds to seize the American dream.

And this got me thinking. Scarface and Tony Montana have transcended pop culture to becoming icons that – for better or worse – ARE admired. Are looked at as aspirations instead of warmings. And what I wanted to posit today was the theory that Brian DePalma, well aware of his film’s reputation and sickened by it, spend 10 years – like his character Carlito who did 5 – reflecting on his choices, thinking hard about the fruits of his labour, and then returned to the crime genre and sought to take Tony down a notch or two, to offer audiences an inverse of the film whose intention was to undo the damage unwittingly done by Scarface, to make a sequel to the film of sorts, where the wild and now-legendary Tony Montana survives, cleans up, does his time and then tries to get out of the life.

For sure, there are similarities between the films, they are two sides of the same coin, with one following a determined man trying to get in and rise to the top, and the other a tired veteran who’s been there, done that, and wants out. There’s even scenes that seem to mimic each other. And upon a recent rewatch, I found it fascinating how there seems to be a fair few scenes from Carlito’s Way that mirror Scarface but put the titular character is a more unceremonious position. Let’s do a rundown of a few

•    Tony Montana’s most famous line is “Say hello to my little friend”, which jump stars a massacre. He comes out of his throne room, which is filled with coke and golden ornaments, full of bravado, with a gun in his hand so epic it doesn’t even really exist, and begins mowing down goons in spectacular fashion. By contrast, Carlito also delivers a taunting threat to his adversaries – here comes the pain – but instead of coming out of a majestic chamber he’s trapped in a toilet, with a measly pistol, an empty one at that, delivering empty threats, tense and fearful. The Scarface shootout is the cathartic climax of the film, the Carlito’s Way one is something of an intro to the film. Both men are trapped and against the odds but only one knows it. And whilst Scarface has Tony commit a massacre before he checks out, in Carlito’s Way, Brigante is presented with the aftermath of a massacre, death everywhere, he laments the wasted life of his kin – there’s an empty feel to the way this scene ends, a complete contrast to the release of Scarface’s shootout.
  

•    In Scarface it’s Tony’s one moment of humanity – sparring the wife and children – that comes back to bite him and triggers his downfall. Carlito also had numerous moments of humanity that came back to bite him, in particular sparring Benny Blanco, the man who ends up killing him. Both refuse to be ruthless at the crucial moment.
  

•    In Scarface Elvira is the blonde wife of drug Kingpin Frank Lopes who Tony ends up having an empty and hollow marriage with. The first time we see her is after Tony’s triumph against the Columbians, and she comes down the elevator and makes her way towards where Tony is sitting, Tony unable to break his gaze from her. In Carlito’s Way, the first time we see the blonde Gail – who Carlito wants to rekindle his relationship with, one far warmer and more real than the Scarface couple – while she busies herself with her dance class he is outside in the rain looking like a peeping Tom, with a dustbin over his head.
  

•    The movie opens with Carlito giving a grand Montana-esque speech in the courtroom about reforming, and we laugh along with him assuming the speech is dripping with sarcasm, but like Kleinfeld, like perhaps those who praised Scarface for its b*llsiness to DePalma’s face, we’re shocked and confused that Carlito is sincere in his intent to chase his ways.
  

•    And in the climax of Scarface Pacino is the aggressor mowing down his enemies, in Carlito’s Way he is being chased, running for his life, and in both films he is ultimately snuck up on and taken out.
  

Once you see Carlito’s Way as a reflection of Scarface, Pacino playing the weary Carlito as the ghost of Tony Montana, you can’t but notice these elements. Even Rolando – Carlito’s former partner – being played by the same guy who played the chainsaw wielding Hector in Scarface. Its Tony’s victory over Hector’s bad deal that opened the floodgates to him, meanwhile Ronaldo is stunned and flummoxed that Carlito is wilfully closing the gates on himself.

As mentioned, I feel complaints that Carlito’s Way is a lazy retread to be a lazy complaint in of itself, not least because even if the titular character was a stand in for Tony Montana, it’s an evolved, older, wiser one. Think to the party at the lawyer Kleinfield’s place – the excess, the debauchery, the kind of stuff Montana would involve himself in, and yet Carlito is sitting by himself, away from it all. In fact, the real stand in for Montana in the film is Kleinfeld, constantly coked out of his mind, paranoid, erratic, unhinged, insecure, and often exhibiting character moments that we can envisage from Tony Montana, like him becoming insecure and irritated about Gail dancing with another guy, when Carlito – his ego having soften over the years – not having a problem with it. Heck, Tony Montana went ballistic when his own sister was dancing with someone. Its Kleinfeld who reminds you more of Tony Montana, both making drug fuelled, manic decisions that land them in hot water.

I guess if we wanted to offer ourselves a little spectrum, we could say there are 4 different versions of Tony Montana in Carlito’s Way. Carlito is the version that lived long enough to see that he was a villain and the life gave him nothing, Kleinfeld is the current rendition of Montana, and Benny Blanco from the Bronx is the young, hungry version of the character, eager and willing to kill and steal his way to the top, eventually killing Brigante as Montana killed Frank. The film alludes to the connection between Carlito and Benny on numerous occasions, one of the most prominent being when Carlito threatens him saying “If I ever see you here you’re dead” but his eyes betray a soften, he’s doesn’t really have it in him. “The eyes never lie Chico” as our Cuban friend might say. Benny on the other hand claps back the same insult to Carlito, but with the ferocity of Tony Montana. At one point in the film a character even says to a nauseated Carlito “this guy is you 20 years ago”. Perhaps there is an element of Brian DePalma – wiser and older like Carlito – who looks back on Tony Montana slightly sickened, so gives him a stand-in in Carlito’s Way that presents him as the disrespectful and moronic representative of the new wave of criminals that he is.

And sticking with the idea that Benny Blanco is a younger version of Carlito, and he kills the titular character, well then in a very real sense Carlito’s past came back to quite literally kill him.

I’d also throw another version of Tony in there. How about Carlito’s young cousin Guajiro? He’s naïve, foolish, he drives around in a conspicuous car and carries around wads of cash on him, and crucially he idolizes Carlito. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that Guajiro represents that very same hip hop generation, that guy with a Tony Montana poster in his bedroom, that guy who thinks he’s Scarface, who wants to be Scarface, tries to embody the ‘get rich or die trying’ mentality, but has no idea of the realities of the criminal underworld? “Yeah I had a dream, but now I’m awake” as Gail says. Scarface is the dream, the fantasy, and Carlito’s Way is the stark and tragic reality.

Lemme keep this short and simple first off praise:
1. The atmosphere- wow oh wow does it set an atmosphere and tone like no other movie i’ve watched by the end does, its scary and tenseful and heavy in a way and made me think like could all this happen to me? (Ik they explained hypnosis doesn’t bypass ur morals but still)
2-The antagonist-very very very interesting, unsettling and introspective
3. Writing quality- After reading an analysis on it i gotta admit its writing quality is superb and it truly does have a convincing argument for being the best written film of all time
4. The acting- incredible

Criticism:

Its really just one: Atleast imo to understand it beyond stuff like “anyone can be a murderer” or whatever u need external knowledge about topics such as civilization ennui and banality of evil in order to really get a depthful understanding of it. Ik its been debated for time and time its meaning and fairs ik it can be (to a not small at all degree) a subjective film to alot of people but i just really wish it spoke about those aforementioned topics in the film cuz then people would be able to understand it beyond just “we all secretly want to kill” and stuff and have a deeper more thoughtful general consensus understanding and/or interpretation of the film.

Creds for the analysis i read: “ourtransientlives” on tiktok

People tend to view movies and art as purely subjective things, but I feel it’s more complicated than that. There’s entire classes dedicated to the study of screenwriting, directing, and acting. And while there isn’t any “fool proof” formulas or easy answers for what works or what doesn’t, there certainly seems to be general rules and guidelines that work better than others. It’s not an exact science, but there is some science to it.

I feel this applies to film criticism as well. If you’re not well versed in the underlying workings of screenwriting, or have a wide depth of film knowledge and film reviews/discussions to draw from, how can you expect to give a competent take on a movie? I’m not saying you need to be a film expert, but every bit of knowledge should help.

This brings me to the discourse I’ve been seeing a lot of around ‘Obsession’. Just to be clear, I have no problem with people not liking the movie as much as I did, but I do have a problem with what I view as a lack of substance in the criticisms levelled at the film. For instance;

• “It wasn’t scary at all, was actually pretty funny at times.”

• “It’s not even a horror movie, it’s more of a thriller.”

• “It was Gen Z ai slop.”

• “How could Bear be so stupid, no one would act like this” (despite Bear’s irrational behaviour and selfishness being the main point of the film.)

• “it was just cliche stuff, nothing original about it”

• “It was average at best.”

These are all criticisms that I view as having little actual substance, or just missing the point of the film entirely. They’ll then take these criticisms and use it to justify giving the movie a lower score like a 5, 6, or 7. Which would be fine if it were backed by any real, substantive criticism. But as is, it just reads to me as ridiculous and not worth taking serious. I’ll do a few quick reviews in what I view as the same style just to better get the point across.

Hereditary

People say this movie was scary but it really wasn’t that scary. Her climbing on the walls looked goofy and was more funny than anything and it took way too long to get going… very boring. Same demonic possession stuff we’ve seen a million times before. 6/10

Halloween

People talk like this movie is some classic but I really don’t see it. Michael is just walking around for the first half of the movie and there’s no cool kills… AND!… how the hell did Michael walk away after being shot 6 times?!… makes no sense whatsoever. 5/10

Alien

This movie is supposed to be original? It’s literally just a slasher in space and takes way too long getting going and the main character is very unlikable for like no reason… And don’t even get me started on the alien. Shit looked goofy as hell. Y’all be gassing this movie up for nothing. 4/10

These are obviously just my joke reviews (lol), but it’s honestly how a lot of the Obsession reviews come off to me. So, am I just being too snobby or are all takes regarding film really not equally valid?

Going to see the Odyssey tomorrow: heres what im expecting tell me will i get what i want? No spoilers please

I'm hoping for Gladiator meets Oppenheimer. Is that a fair expectation? Does it have a similar tone, pacing, and dialogue to Oppenheimer, while also delivering the scale and action of Gladiator?

I'm really excited and i hope my expectations are met

Most of the criticism I see towards Pixar’s current releases are focused on the lack of compelling storytelling driven by studio’s business plan: a balance between cash-cow sequels deprived of fresh ideas and originals that don’t hit as hard as their bangers from days past. In terms of visuals, some have been vocal about the bean-mouth design of the human characters which by now have become Pixar’s defining style. But I don’t see many discussions addressing the decline in "visual wit" beyond the animation of human characters.

“Inside Out” and “Soul”, for instance, were arguably successful in the storytelling department, but the design of the movies’ inner worlds felt incredibly underwhelming to me – from dreams being shot in a Hollywood-like studio run by jellybean-shaped workers to the flat, unremarkable dimension inhabited by unborn souls. There’s nothing as cinematically inspired as the galaxy of doors in the climax of “Monsters Inc”, which was set in a human-inspired factory but really took the time to reinvent the production line – not to mention to conceive different characters with unique features.

That’s what impressed me the most in “Elementals”, Pixar’s 2023 romcom: the care put into the world-building is old-school Pixar. The different elementals – Earth, Air, Fire and Water – are distinctive and expressive as characters. Their unique cultures and way of life are seen even in the corners of the frame: the backgrounds are so rich in detail that a casual train ride can treat us with a blink-it-and-miss-it joke that didn’t need to be there. It made me wonder if the script covered all of this – it’s not an intentional brief scene, like the sex-coded joke involving an ‘Earth’ couple picking up each other’s apple in the bedroom – or if some of those amusing background characters were included by the animators that went the extra mile.

The script itself is not without its flaws, but as far as romcoms go, I'm yet to see an animated take that hit the ideal spot between kids and their parents, or made with so much care and effort.

This essay argues that the real significance of The Odyssey is the use of the IMAX camera. Because IMAX cameras were always too loud to record dialogue, the giant format was locked out of filming dialogue, the "blimp" housing Nolan got IMAX to create changes that, letting the largest image in cinema rest on a face.

The essay places this in a long lineage of tools remaking art: the paint tube that made Impressionism possible, the iron-framed piano that made Chopin possible, and somewhat ironically the Greek alphabet that captured the Odyssey itself from the oral tradition.

https://quillette.com/2026/07/21/the-oldest-tradition-in-art/

I've been thinking about Black Panther, and I keep coming back to a question.
What if Wakanda isn't just a celebration of Africa, but also a eulogy for futures that many African nations were never allowed to have because of colonialism and external interference?
To me, Wakanda feels less like a reflection of Africa as it is today and more like a lament for what parts of the continent might have become under different historical circumstances. It's a vision of possibility that history denied.
At the same time, I find myself conflicted. Wakanda is often treated as a symbol of Africa, yet it's still one fictional nation with one dominant culture. It draws inspiration from cultures across the continent, but I sometimes wonder whether that unintentionally compresses one of the most culturally diverse places on Earth into a single image of "Africa."
We wouldn't expect one fictional country to represent all of Europe or all of Asia, so why are we often comfortable letting Wakanda stand in for an entire continent?
This isn't a criticism of Black Panther. I actually think it's one of Marvel's most thought-provoking films precisely because it raises questions like these.
Do you see Wakanda primarily as a celebration of African possibility, or can it also be read as mourning futures that history never allowed to unfold?

As everyone’s talking about The Odyssey right now, I want to use it to talk about film in general

SPOILERS ABOUND

In the film, I’d say we get a pretty faithful retelling of the story in that it hits most of the big events of the story within a modern blockbuster framework (Polyphemus, Circe, Calypso, the whirlpool and the suitor conflict etc).

One of the things I find interesting about these events is they’re all told to us from the main characters perspective, as he’s trying to recollect who he is, what’s happened, and how’s gotten to where he is.

Basically, none of these events happen in the present.

We also get a few of these events from one or two other characters perspectives, but basically the majority of the film is Odysseus telling Calypso what he remembers.

For example, we get the bulk of story of the battle
Of Troy from Menelaus, and when Odysseus recounts the battle at the end of the film, we get a completely different perspective on the story.

As the film explores, essentially what is PTSD/trauma/guilt etc, it feels like we’re given the opportunity to wonder- did the events of the movie really happen, or much like we see Athena as the priestess who Odysseus saw be cut down, are they projections of his own psyche?

Is Athena really there and she’s assuming the form of the priestess, or is he imagining her as the priestess because he can’t reconcile his own guilt?

Did the events of the movie actually happen, or are they the projections of a man who is riddled with guilt and trauma?

This brings me to my question about movies in general- I feel like I’ve entered a time in my life where I take films at face value, like what happens on screen is what happens, like for example, with the Odyssey, because I know the story, when I see these mythological creatures I’m of the mind that this is real, that this is the world they live in. I don’t need the to represent anything other than what they are

At the same time I can accept, or entertain, that they may be symbolic or have more meaning than what is present- and that can be achieved through cinematography, lighting, sound, framing, blocking, story, dialogue etc.

And tbh I think everyone going into this movie is going into knowing it’s a fantastical movie, the same way we watch Lord of the Rings or Star Wars.

I never thought about it being anything but real until at the end when Odysseus recounts his perspective of the war and Athena disappears.

I could be mistaken but, to me, the film doesn’t present Odysseus as an unreliable narrator in the way other films utilize that technique - like another Matt Damon movie, The Last Duel, uses that Rashomon effect, and we get different perspectives of the same event. It’s central to that movie in a way that doesn’t seem to be so for this film.

To me, this film isn’t like that. And it’s not even that he’s as obviously an unreliable narrator as Leonard Shelby in Nolan’s Memento. But I think the film does a great job at just presenting that as something to ponder after the fact.

Maybe another way to say this is I don’t think perspective is the point of the film necessarily, I think he’s exploring a man grappling with the consequences of his actions, and it takes place within a world of fantasy- so we assume everything that happened is real and happened, but there’s just enough element to make you ponder the reality of the world and the events.

Are these Gods real? Did he actually meet these mythological creatures?

I think Nolan is also aware enough of the meta aspect of perspective and suspension of disbelief to be able to provoke these idea and thoughts from the audience without exploring it directly.

I feel like I’m rambling so I’m going to try and bring it back together- as far as perspectives go, how do you guys approach watching films? As I said Ive started exploring watching films at face value, and that doesn’t mean rejecting any symbolism or deeper meaning, but just accepting that what happens on screen is what’s happening on screen and is real, even if only to a certain character, as opposed to having to have some deeper meaning where the thing is representative of something else.

I’ don’t know, I’m struggling to put this into words, like how to define other ways of watching films, so hopefully someone more educated and well-spoken than myself can pick up on what I’m trying to explore.

But I do recall one time reading a post where someone had a question about a movie, I think it might’ve been Mulholland Drive, and everyone was saying that they were trying to hard and as someone who doesn’t understand that film and doesn’t think you’re necessarily supposed to, I thought the film is better watched at face value and taking it for what it is instead of trying to understand it or find something within it- not that you shouldn’t do those things but that a lot of those things reveal themselves by just accepting it for what it is

Hi, I wanted go watch The Odyssey as the reviews seemed good, but I was concerned when I saw it was another Nolan film.

Oppenheimer had similar good reviews but it was hands down one of the worst films I have ever watched - full of useless dialogue, too much talking, weird pacing and bad storyline. Watching it was such a drag and I remember people leaving the theatre halfway through.

For those of you who have seen the film, is The Odyssey the same type of film like Oppenheimer? If so, I’d rather not see it.

I really like films with great cinematography and engaging storyline - like Argo, Dune 2, Conclave - which had top tier cinematography and storyline, that engages you throughout instead of feeling boring or overemphasizing loud sound effects.

Thanks for the input in advance

TLDR; I want to know if The Odyssey is like Oppenheimer with a lot of talking and convoluted storyline

I don't mean to start a hate jerkfest because I actually like him as a director. I think he has a lot of great qualities that give his directing a unique and original style. But when it comes to his writing skills, I find his inability to take risks or seek originality quite tiring.

After watching the Oddissey I've distilled the things I dislike about his writing skills into a few distinct traits:

• Bland and sanitized: Historically, the greeks are notorious for some seriously disturbing and unnerving things. This felt like a Disney PG13 story.
  
• Clinical and safe: The twist that was added to Oddisseus was interesting but it never goes anywhere compelling. It's been done before in much better ways.
  
• Anemic: characters are bland and anemic. Every scene feels like sitting in a C-level suites board room discussing next corporate merger (yes, Anne can make it rain tears, so that's something).

I don't know. Can we get Nolan a co-writer?

Which films use visual storytelling so effectively, that you could follow most of the narrative with the sound muted?

They say that film is a visual medium, but many movies depend heavily on dialogue. Which films communicate their story primarily through images, blocking, and visuals? I'm looking for examples where muting the audio wouldn't prevent you from understanding most of what's happening.

I was thinking about this the other day and the different style of the two movies. On one hand, Eggers actually feels like hes transporting you to the Viking age. The customs, the culture, all of it feels strange and foreign but its really cool to have that feeling. When I see a historical epic I want to feel tranpoetrd to that time.

Nolan does a different approach. He tries to make Odysseus feel very modern and relatable. Theres nothing strange and alien about his culture and his values. He takes xenia which is a specific guest-host relationship with customs and ritual and makes it into the golden rule which is the modern Christian standard. His setting never makes feel like its an ancient greek hero I'm watching.

Since the release of The Odyssey, I’ve heard many superlatives - from critics and audiences alike - about how large scale and colossal the film is, with many drawing parallels between the film and traditional epic films. In the lead up to the film, Matt Damon would often say that he felt like he “got to make a David Lean film”, and many audiences have described this as Ben Hur or Lawrence of Arabia for the 21st century.

While it is a film of considerable scale, I do not find it comparable to scale to a classic Old Hollywood epic. If we use Lawrence of Arabia as a reference point, that films includes multiple sweeping shots of hundreds (if not more) of extras, which creates an overwhelming sense of grandeur. In comparison to Lean’s film, The Odyssey (even in its large scale set pieces) only features dozens of extras in frame at any given time. The only exception to this is the shot of Odysseus and his crew fleeing from Hades, which is a shot that lasts only a few seconds, before the editing and direction briefly whisks us away. Even the Troy battle pales on scale compared to a David Lean film, or the scale of the army battles in Lord of the Rings.

In interviews for Oppenheimer, Nolan would often say “cinema is not a tech medium. The innovation should emerge from what’s on the screen, not what the screen is.” But when I hear people overstate the scale of The Odyssey, I’m left wondering: is the scale of the film inherently epic, or is it merely shot on an epic format? If you look at the Laestrygonians sequence, it is no bigger in scale than what you would find in a film like the Northman. And the portrayal of Ithica feels shockingly small in scale, as if the entire place is little bigger than the palace which we barely leave.

I want to propose a reading of Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God as cyberpunk — a cyberpunk from which the future has been subtracted. The film lacks nearly every element by which the genre is usually recognized: neon, implants, networks, megacorporations. Yet it may expose cyberpunk's underlying structure more clearly than its familiar megacities do.

Cyberpunk is usually defined through its props. Here I want to try a condition instead — an interval that has lost its outside. Powers replace one another and technology keeps changing, yet no change leads the world beyond itself. Life continues everywhere, and still it has no time to become history. That's why cyberpunk becomes the inhabited form of an end of history.

German adapts the Strugatsky brothers' novella about observers from Earth stationed on a planet whose history has failed to pass from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. By the end of the film it becomes clear that Arkanar has no future. That doesn't disqualify it from cyberpunk, because without the neon in the way, the genre's temporal structure is just easier to see.

Frozen eternity has two asymptotes. The classical cyberpunk megalopolis approaches it from above, through the maximum speed of exchange, where time burns up in circulation. Arkanar approaches the same eternity from below, through zero speed: standing water, rain without a determinate time of day, a present unable to become anything except its own continuation. Acceleration and stagnation face one another as two limits of the same impossibility of exit.

German gives this condition a cinematic form. The frame is crowded by faces and objects that obstruct the action or displace it. The camera repeatedly abandons the apparent center of a scene for an unknown body at its edge. Characters look directly into the lens. The film's duration becomes an ordeal for the viewer, eroding both distance and the clear division of time. Relying on our viewing habits, we expect the privilege of an outside view and gradually discover that the image has noticed our presence.

The film also inverts several familiar structures of the genre. Gibson wrote that the street finds its own uses for things. In Arkanar, the street digests the new almost literally. Scholars are drowned in latrines, and a book functions as a death sentence. The hacker usually acts from below, combining social insignificance with an excess of access. Here Rumata is placed above. He is revered as the son of a god and possesses knowledge and near physical invulnerability, yet each of his deeds is exhausted within its own moment without founding a new history.

Earth observes Arkanar through an archive while remaining forbidden to intervene. The result is a strange cybernetics in which the channel of observation operates without a channel of control. Earth, Rumata, the camera and the audience occupy the outside in turn, however none of these positions becomes an exit. Total knowledge turns out to converge on the same limit as the megalopolis's infinite speed, only reached through information instead of exchange — another way into frozen eternity. History needs an outcome that is still undecided, not yet contained in any archive. Once Arkanar's pattern is known in full, intervening would mean acting on a world already closed, which is no longer a historical act at all. Consequently the viewer's knowledge is sufficient for diagnosis and insufficient for history.

Two contemporary references sit near this argument without quite covering it. Mark Fisher's slow cancellation of the future works as a hauntology. It needs something to mourn, a future once believed in and then lost. Arkanar was never promised one, and its asymptote from below requires no lost object at all, only zero speed held indefinitely — so Fisher's mechanism turns out to describe one half of frozen eternity, not the whole of it. Yanis Varoufakis's technofeudalism asks who extracts rent under the new order, a question that presupposes separated economic and political functions. Arkanar's powers haven't finished separating into functions that could extract from one another in the first place. The film asks the prior question: what remains of biography and will once a world can rearrange bodies but can no longer produce history?

The full essay is linked here. I am especially interested in whether the proposed definition of cyberpunk clarifies the film or simply places too much theoretical weight on it.

Tyler Perry’s Straw, to summarize, is the answer to 'how bad can it get?’

Bad. Really bad.

As was seen in how horrible a day, the main character, Janiyah Wiltkinson had to go through.

Starting the morning being yelled at by her landlord for unpaid rent, being fired from her job after going to her daughter, getting her car hit and towed by police, and coming home for rest just to see all her belongings out in the rain. These misfortunes happened one after another. To the point where I had to stop as I was getting overwhelmed with the hopelessness of her situation.

And was I but a witness?

There I was, watching this movie about a single mother working two jobs to care for her sick child, while I sat comfortably in a secure home provided by my parents and watching it on a monthly paid streaming service.

How could someone like me ever understand an ounce of the pain someone like her does?

The label empath is something people want to associate with themselves. Priding themselves with the ability to feel others' emotions and share it with them. It is a beautiful, human thing.

But, we can't carry the load for anyone else.

No matter how heavy a person's burden is, we can only stand to the side and assist them as much as we can.

Yet the attempt to makes all the difference anyways.

Janiyah's burden wasn't caused by her decisions as much as it is society's treatment of her.

Modern economy and social constructs ensure that people who are already up can rise higher and people who are at the bottom stay down.

It shouldn't be that hard to be a single mother with a sick child.

It shouldn't be needed for her to work two jobs just to be barely afloat.

It shouldn't have taken for her to reach her breaking point for people to show up and rally for her.

But it was. And that is how a cruel world breaks a human's soul so deeply.

For me, the most heartbreaking part of the movie wasn't the reveal that her daughter had already died nor was it that she will go to prison for possibly her whole life.

It was how she looked at the people rallying for her, cheering for her freedom, when it was all too late.

When the screen turned black and the credits rolled in, a thought crossed my mind— 'Thank God, it wasn't a true story'

I knew, however, that that was a lie.

One look beyond the glamorized curtain of celebrities covered in diamonds and riding private jets would reveal the true people in the world. Those that are working 9-to-5, trapped in sweatshops, and learning to fall asleep amongst the sounds of drones.

Though we call ourselves social animals, human beings are inherently individualistic. We live our own lives, deal with our own problems, and love the people that sustain us.

It is more natural for people to be selfish than they are to be giving.

It makes the decision to be kind anyway all the more profound.

We listen to a person's stories to know more about them, we give whatever we can to the homeless begging in the streets, and we hope for a better future despite the odds working against us.

That kindness saves people.

Like how the bank manager Nicole stood by Janiyah despite the threat to her own life. Like how Detective Raymond saw her own mother in Janiyah and helped her despite her colleague's prejudices.

It is proof that there is softness in a world that only knew how to take.

As the conversation from 'The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse' went:

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" the fox asked.

"Kind," said the boy.

The mole hummed in agreement.

"Nothing beats kindness. It sits quietly beyond all things."

I wanted to share a personal film project I’ve been working on called Properly Screened: https://properlyscreened.com

Last year, I started a project to see every film on the BFI's Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time list in a theater.

The challenge is that I don’t live in a major city, so finding these films often means planning trips to places like LA and the SF Bay Area, tracking down one-night screenings, and piecing together schedules.

What began as a little janky blog to keep track of what I was watching became a new website I'm really proud of. The new site includes reviews of the films (I’ve seen 40 so far!) and eventually I hope it becomes a place to help create more opportunities for people to experience these films together.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I’d love for you to check it out:

https://properlyscreened.com

And I’d especially love to hear from anyone else who has taken on a personal film project, travels for repertory screenings, or goes out of their way to see movies on the big screen. What theaters or festivals should I know about?

The new cameras of The Odyssey conceal a familiar Hollywood machine for transforming warrior violence into moral injury.

As Richard Brody notes, Homer does not present the Cicones raid as a moral crisis, only as an expedition that went wrong. Its brutality is reported administratively: he sacks the city, kills the men, enslaves the women and divides the spoils among his crew. The immediate mistake is not the raid itself but remaining too long afterward, losing discipline and allowing the Cicones to counterattack. The poem’s moral universe condemns sacrilege and failures of hospitality, but the ordinary violence of conquest is not treated as Odysseus’s psychic original sin.

Nolan cannot preserve that moral alienness and retain Odysseus as the emotionally accessible center of a $250 million Universal film. He therefore makes the same adjustment American Sniper made to Chris Kyle. The historical Kyle insisted that his wartime kills would not count among his sins because every person he shot deserved to die. Eastwood’s film softens that certainty into haunted silence, domestic estrangement and the burden of being exceptionally good at necessary violence. Nolan similarly replaces the ancient warrior’s lack of embarrassment with the approved conscience of the modern combat drama: Odysseus feels terrible.

Matt Damon consequently plays him less as Homer’s theatrical liar than as Bradley Cooper’s mythological predecessor. Outside combat, both men appear dulled and physically stranded. Kyle sits before a blank television, unable to enter the suburban life he claims to protect. Odysseus plays house with Calypso, technically safe but incapable of experiencing peace as anything other than stasis. A clear mission restores each man instantly. Their uncertainty disappears once someone must be protected, a threat identified or an impossible shot taken.

The Trojan Horse becomes Nolan’s equivalent of the sniper’s impossible shot: the supreme achievement that proves the hero’s genius while destroying his capacity for peace. Troy’s victims become the contents of Odysseus’s nightmares, just as Iraqi violence is largely filtered through what it does to Kyle and the Americans around him. The conquered are granted suffering, but the warrior retains ownership of its emotional meaning.

The parallel becomes most revealing in the climax. Eastwood initially presents Iraq as an endless series of tactically clear but strategically meaningless engagements. Mustafa (the rival sniper) is then elevated into an uber-villain so Kyle’s war can acquire a final target. Kill him, and Kyle can come home.

Nolan inherits Antinous rather than inventing him, but uses him similarly. Time, grief and moral injury cannot be defeated. A finite group of men threatening Odysseus’s wife and son can. The warrior’s paranoia becomes vigilance and the violence that has supposedly ruined him becomes the only force capable of restoring his home.

I am currently doing a history of film marathon with my girlfriend where we both watch one film from every year, starting with the first ever motion picture (The Horse in Motion, 1878) to modern day (2026 currently) and we are in the mid 1910s of film history.

These early motion pictures are extremely boring and grating to watch for modern audience members like ourselves (we are only doing this as history nerds who want to learn more about the medium as we both aren't cinephiles, but its been a huge slog to watch these early films that have no audio, poor film direction (due to the technology), lack of a engaging narrative, low quality, etc). Cabiria and The Birth of Nation were both the most boring/non-engaging movies I ever watched and the fact that we still 15 more years of movies to go through before we even hit the first film with audio (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930), is making me worried.

So I ask you all who have watched movie from the early days of film, when do you personally think film as a medium started improving heavily and becoming an enjoyable art form that engaged you and wasn't as restricted by the times it was produced? Would it be the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, etc? I am just curious what you all think.

... as is Oppenheimer.

Both are stories of men who choose to use their god-given gifts to get ahead in a morally dubious manner.

Nolan is clearly struggling with selling out his talent to optimize for the highest box office returns, rather than the art of filmmaking.

(It looks like I need a few more words to hit the required characters for this post. Hopefully, this does the trick.)

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has largely been criticized for the wrong reasons. Most discussions surrounding the film focus on questions of historical morality or fidelity to the source material. Has Nolan modernized Odysseus? Has he imposed contemporary values onto an ancient text? Is his interpretation too sympathetic or insufficiently brutal? These questions are understandable, but they are ultimately secondary. The more fundamental question is what Nolan is attempting to preserve from Homer. Once that question becomes the starting point, Odyssey looks less like a modernization of the epic and more like a philosophical continuation of Homer’s central concerns. Nolan is not interested in reconstructing the Bronze Age as an archaeological exercise. He is interested in preserving the moral and political tensions that made Homer’s epic endure. What makes the Odyssey timeless is not its mythology or historical setting, but its willingness to confront the contradictions that emerge whenever greatness, violence, and civilization become intertwined.

Odysseus occupies a unique position within Western literature because he resists nearly every modern conception of heroism. He is neither morally pure nor conventionally noble. His defining characteristic is not courage but intelligence. He survives through manipulation, deception, and adaptability. Modern audiences frequently describe him as an antihero, but even that label feels insufficient. Homer does not present Odysseus as a critique of heroism. Rather, he presents him as one of its earliest and most complicated expressions. The Odyssey is not simply interested in whether greatness exists. It is interested in the price greatness demands from both the individual and the social order that elevates him. Homer admires Odysseus, but he never allows admiration to become unconditional. His arrogance repeatedly produces tragedy. His greatest strengths become inseparable from his greatest failures. Human greatness in Homer is therefore never entirely heroic. It remains fundamentally ambiguous. What survives across millennia is not the image of an ideal hero but the uncomfortable realization that extraordinary individuals are often inseparable from the suffering and contradictions that accompany their achievements.

This ambiguity has defined Christopher Nolan’s filmography for decades. Nolan’s protagonists are almost always exceptional individuals whose abilities place them outside ordinary human experience. They are scientists, magicians, dream architects, explorers, and political symbols. What connects them is not their profession but their relationship with greatness itself. The Prestige explores the destructive consequences of obsession. Inception examines the ethics of manipulating reality and memory. Interstellar asks whether human progress can ever be separated from sacrifice. Oppenheimer confronts the relationship between genius and moral responsibility. Odyssey continues this philosophical trajectory. Nolan has never been particularly interested in heroes. He is interested in extraordinary people confronting the consequences of their own extraordinariness and the social structures that transform exceptional acts into historical achievements. His films consistently ask why societies are willing to celebrate certain forms of greatness while simultaneously obscuring the violence, sacrifice, and moral compromises that make such greatness possible.

Viewed through this lens, Odyssey becomes far more than a mythological adventure. One of the most overlooked aspects of Homer’s epic is that it is fundamentally a postwar narrative. Modern adaptations frequently emphasize monsters and adventure while treating the destruction of Troy as little more than narrative background. Homer does the opposite. Troy remains psychologically present throughout the entire journey. Odysseus is not simply traveling home. He is attempting to reconcile who he has become with the person he once was and with the political order that celebrates his accomplishments. His homecoming is therefore not merely personal. It represents a confrontation between the individual and the historical consequences of his actions. If Nolan chooses to emphasize this aspect of the epic, he is not modernizing Homer. He is recognizing that the Odyssey has always been concerned with what remains after victory. The destruction that precedes heroic narratives is never fully absent from Homer’s text. It simply returns in different forms throughout Odysseus’ journey.

The film’s narrative structure reflects this interpretation remarkably well. Critics who describe The Odyssey as a modern hero’s journey misunderstand both Homer and Nolan’s narrative interests. The Odyssey does not function like contemporary Hollywood storytelling. It is episodic, fragmented, and deliberately nonlinear in its emotional progression. The literary scholar Erich Auerbach famously argued that Homer presents reality through complete and immediate presence. Every event possesses equal narrative significance. Nothing is hidden behind symbolism or subordinated to a singular dramatic climax. Homer allows the world itself to become worthy of contemplation. Nolan’s filmmaking has always demonstrated a similar fascination with fragmented perspectives and nonlinear storytelling. Odyssey’s episodic structure therefore represents not a departure from his style but one of its most natural expressions. The individual encounters throughout the journey are not merely obstacles delaying Odysseus’ return. They function as philosophical examinations of what civilization, humanity, and heroism ultimately mean.

The mythological episodes become particularly revealing when viewed through this framework. Circe is not merely a fantasy sequence designed to showcase spectacle. Transformation occupies an important place within mythology because it externalizes psychological and moral realities. Human beings become animals not because mythology is irrational but because it visualizes philosophical ideas that would otherwise remain abstract. Nolan’s decision to emphasize physical transformation rather than digital excess is therefore significant. It privileges embodiment and perception over spectacle. The Sirens operate according to a similar principle. Their importance extends far beyond mythology itself. Horkheimer and Adorno famously interpreted the Siren episode as one of the foundational allegories of modern civilization. Odysseus desires unrestricted experience while simultaneously constructing mechanisms that prevent him from surrendering himself completely to that experience. He wishes to hear the Sirens without accepting the consequences. Civilized societies constantly seek freedom while simultaneously constructing systems designed to regulate and contain it. They pursue transcendence without relinquishing control. Nolan transforms this contradiction into a meditation on cinema itself. The audience is permitted to observe temptation without ever fully participating in it. Cinema becomes uniquely suited to exploring the tension between desire and distance that lies at the center of both the Sirens episode and modern experience more broadly.

The political implications of this interpretation are equally important. Many discussions surrounding the Odyssey reduce its political dimension to a simple antiwar message. Such a reading dramatically underestimates both Homer and Nolan. Neither artist is interested in offering uncomplicated moral conclusions. The more uncomfortable question concerns civilization itself. What happens when societies cease recognizing their own violence as violence? What happens when conquest becomes synonymous with heroism? At what point does political order begin presenting its own destructive capacities as historical necessity? The barbarians are rarely the people civilizations describe as barbarians. Throughout history, political communities have consistently justified violence through appeals to order, progress, morality, and necessity. What is celebrated as civilization often depends upon the successful invisibility of the violence that sustains it. Odyssey appears deeply interested in this historical pattern. Odysseus does not simply represent an individual hero. He represents a civilization’s understanding of greatness and the values that civilization chooses to immortalize. His tragedy is therefore larger than his personal suffering. It concerns the relationship between historical achievement and the narratives societies construct to justify it.

This thematic concern establishes a direct connection between Odyssey and Oppenheimer. Both films explore the consequences of human achievement on a civilizational scale. Oppenheimer creates a technological revolution capable of destroying humanity. Odysseus participates in the destruction of Troy and becomes immortalized as one of history’s greatest heroes. Neither figure can escape the consequences of their accomplishments. More importantly, both films reject the comforting assumption that moral complexity invalidates greatness. Nolan is not interested in reducing extraordinary individuals to villains. He is interested in exposing the uncomfortable reality that greatness and destruction coexist and that societies frequently celebrate one while obscuring the other. His antagonists are similarly ideological figures rather than conventional villains. The Joker embraces chaos as liberation. Bane exposes the fragility of institutions. Antinous rejects every form of higher authority. Nolan consistently returns to the same principle throughout his work. Power must remain accountable to something beyond itself. Institutions matter precisely because they are meant to limit the concentration and self-justification of power. The danger emerges whenever individuals or political orders begin believing that their greatness exempts them from the principles they claim to defend. Or in other words: Nolan stays a conservative liberal at heart (poor men).

Ultimately, Odyssey is not interested in asking whether Odysseus deserves to be called a hero. Homer already understood that such a question is too simple. The real tragedy of Odysseus is not that he becomes morally corrupt or discovers that war is destructive. It is that he comes to understand that his greatness cannot be separated from the suffering it produced or from the political order that transformed that suffering into glory. His return home is therefore not a conventional triumph. It is a confrontation with himself, with the civilization he represents, and with the costs required to preserve the heroic narratives upon which civilizations are built. Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is not an attempt to modernize Homer. It is an attempt to take Homer seriously. The film does not ask whether extraordinary individuals should exist. It asks what societies demand from them, what they owe society in return, and whether civilization can ever fully separate greatness from violence. The most profound question posed by both Homer and Nolan is ultimately the same: what becomes of a hero once he understands the true meaning of his own victory?

This was my second Michael Mann movie after Manhunter. While they are miles apart from each other, both clearly showcase Mann's distinct craft and colors.

During the first act, I thought this was just like every other action movie around and wondered why it is revered as such a masterpiece. Well, that assumption quickly backfired, because after sitting through the full 170 minutes, I had completely changed my mind.

The pacing turned out to be really amazing. The first 30-40 minutes after the opening scene might feel slow, but it builds into something so engaging that you physically can't look away.

I loved how both the gangsters and the police operated on real codes and strict discipline. They refused to break their own rules no matter what happened, which ultimately proved fatal for some of them.

This movie gave an equal hand to both parties in that high stakes cat-and-mouse chase. I mean, at one moment the police outsmart the bad guys, and the next moment, the tables are turned so realistically and convincingly. No one truly wins, both live by their own rules with no room for mistakes, because mistakes prove fatal, and they really did in some cases here.

Absolutely loved the dialogues. They were incredible and totally matched the overall theme of the movie. Nothing over the top, no cheap exposition.

Regarding the acting, I didn't like Al Pacino in it at first, since he brought his typical chaotic, screaming energy to the mix. But slowly and gradually, his character revealed deep, complex layers throughout Acts 2 and 3, which made his performance completely memorable.

But for me, the star of the show was De Niro. He played Neil Macaulay brilliantly. From start to finish, his character remained consistent, gripping, and brutal.

Then comes the action, featuring by far the most realistic shooting sequences I have ever seen. Everything felt incredibly real. The spill out onto the street didn't feel like a movie at all.

I guess the thing that truly elevated it from other action movies was the sound design. Mann used really low-volume background music during the sequence, which made the characters easy to hear even amidst the chaos.

He then utilized every single sound in that Los Angeles mayhem to make it unforgettable. The shells dropping from the guns, the glass blowing up, the magazines running out, the amazing tactical reloads, the use of the landmarks as cover. Everything made it so visceral.

The most amazing thing was how everyone in the film had their own real issues and morals to deal with. Mann thoroughly explored the flaws, weaknesses, bad choices, and personal lives of both the gangsters and the police department. No one was underwritten. No one was just a 'badass guy' with no believable backstory, and no one was invulnerable. Everyone and everything felt completely grounded and human.

I will say that Heat is not a heavily stylized, cinematography-focused movie, since most of the shots look simpler than they did in Manhunter. But Mann deliberately chose not to over-stylize it, because doing so would have compromised the grounded, intricate nature of the characters and the setting. That is another area where the movie excels. It is entirely character driven. Mild style, pure substance.

But that ending gave me a question to ponder: both Neil and Vincent had made it clear not to hesitate for a second to take the other out in case they confronted each other. So in the climax, did Neil really hesitate, or was Vincent too quick and smart for him?

What do you think about it? Let's talk.