Isolation is a story pressure cooker: remove society and watch what characters are made of. This tag collects reviews of films and fiction built on isolation, physical and psychological, and what the cut-off state reveals.
DecemberEmily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems and let ten of them into print, most without her name. Her first editors smoothed out the dashes and capitals to make her sell, and it took until 1955 for readers to see the…
1990sDances with Wolves (1990) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner directed a three-hour Western largely in Lakota with subtitles, which nobody wanted financed, and it made four hundred million dollars and beat Goodfellas. The film is…
2020sNomadland (2020) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Frances McDormand lives in a van among real people playing themselves, and the film is at its best whenever she is listening. What it will not do is name…
2010sRoom (2015) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Emma Donoghue adapted her own novel and kept the one decision that makes it bearable, which is that everything is narrated by a five-year-old who thinks the shed is…
2010sThe American (2010) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Anton Corbijn made a slow European art film about a gunsmith in an Italian hill town, Focus marketed it as a George Clooney thriller, and it opened at…
1970sKlute (1971) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The film is called Klute and it is not about Klute. Jane Fonda won the Academy Award for a performance built out of therapy sessions and a tape recorder,…
1960sMidnight Cowboy (1969) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The only X-rated film ever to win Best Picture, and the X was self-inflicted by a nervous studio head who consulted a psychiatrist. Three million dollars, forty-five back,…
2000sI Am Legend (2007) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The first hour is one of the best depictions of solitude ever filmed. Then the ending inverts the meaning of the book it is named after, and…
2010sGravity (2013) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Cuaron opens on a thirteen minute unbroken shot and then destroys everything in it. The technical achievement is genuine and permanent. The dialogue keeps explaining a film that was…
1960sL'Avventura (1960) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A woman vanishes on a yacht trip and the film loses interest in finding her. Jeered at Cannes, given a jury prize by the same festival, and on best-of…
1980sLeviathan (1989) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. An underwater Alien with a good cast and a wrecked Soviet ship. One of three deep-sea monster films released in 1989, and the middle one.
2000sGhost Ship (2002) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A salvage crew boards a liner missing since 1962. The first twenty seconds are among the best in modern horror and the remaining eighty minutes cannot follow them.
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