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.
2010sSeptember 10, 2026
Room (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…
2010sSeptember 10, 2026
The 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…
1970sSeptember 10, 2026
Klute (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,…
1960sSeptember 10, 2026
Midnight 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,…
2000sSeptember 10, 2026
I 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…
2010sSeptember 10, 2026
Gravity (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…
1980sSeptember 10, 2026
Leviathan (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.
2000sSeptember 10, 2026
Ghost 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.
1970sSeptember 10, 2026
Taxi Driver (1976) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Schrader wrote it living in his car after a divorce, and the film never once steps outside Travis Bickle's head. The narration sounds reasonable. That is the horror.
2000sJune 6, 2026
Vampires descend on an Alaskan town facing a month without sunrise. The idea is so good it feels stolen from someone smarter.
2020sJune 6, 2026
The Last Voyage of the Demeter earns its 6.5 by taking a few haunting pages from Dracula and building an entire film from them, with mixed but genuinely entertaining results. The film's great strength is its vision of Dracula as…
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