Hello film lovers,

The Oscars are done and dusted and the results of the 5th (Unofficial) Letterboxd Community Awards are just around the corner. Also upon us: the March Around The World challenge, which many of you have signed up for. We do love a great community challenge and this one is about watching 30 feature films from 30 different countries in 30 days. To help you get started, we’ve selected some recent reviews of the five films nominated for the 2018 foreign language Oscar. And Old School this month revisits some films that missed out on the Best Picture Oscar. (More of those here!)

We also had fun recently crunching the data on those four favorite films we make you pick for your profile pages. A top 100 films with the most fans emerged, with not too many surprises in the top five: Pulp Fiction, The Empire Strikes Back, Fight Club, The Dark Knight and 2001: A Space Odyssey. But when a member suggested we run the numbers again based on your pronoun selections, things got a lot more interesting.

A couple of small site enhancements: Pro and Patron members can now pin up to two reviews to their profile using the profile tag (the two most recently tagged will appear in addition to your popular and recent reviews). We’ll bring pinned reviews to our apps in due course. And—this one’s for all members—when editing a list on the website, there are now some additional sort options you can apply before saving your list.

We’re now recovering from all the Oscar excitement, and quietly waiting along with the rest of the world to be able to see Annihilation. Hope you’re doing the same…

Happy watching,
The Letterboxd crew

Opening Credits

In cinemas and coming soon
A Wrinkle in Time
A Wrinkle in Time

You get a movie, and you get a movie, and you get a movie! Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time—about Meg Murry’s search for her father—finally comes to the big screen March 9 via Ava DuVernay, with Oprah as Mrs Which. Be sure to add the 2018 adaptation to your watchlist, not this earlier one.

Tomb Raider

Speaking of young women whose fathers have gone missing, Lara Croft is back, and Alicia Vikander has said she has never lifted as many weights in her life as she did to prepare for Tomb Raider.

Isle of Dogs

Also opening this month is Wes Anderson’s newest stop-motion dogstravaganza Isle of Dogs. Early reviews are doggone positive. “More potently than Grand Budapest, there’s a whole lot of heart here,” says Stephen. “Isle Of Dogs is Anderson at his loosest and goosiest; you could say he’s been let off his leash,” writes EmpireOnline.

Ready Player One

It was a fun if slightly trashy and predictable young-adult novel, but our expectations for the film version of Ready Player One are high, because Spielberg, really. Mark Rylance is in it, and Shuri from Black Panther, and you just know it’ll be emotional.

Star Wars

One star vs five stars, fight!
Black Panther

Black Panther

★ “Utterly disappointing. After-school special. I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s loving Black Panther in The Avengers. If a person is really looking for sophisticated, relevant black power fiction, watch Luke Cage on Netflix. This is boring, contrived, and borrowed, worse even than the mess that was made of Doctor Strange.” —Kevin Royal Johnson

★★★★★ “I loved this movie. Marvel should learn from both this and Thor: Ragnarok that if you hire non-white directors you’ll get a better product because Taika injected some anti-colonial sentiment into Ragnarok and Coogler brought the idea ‘what if black people were allowed to thrive untouched by white civilization’ and put all of that sentiment into designing Wakanda. An afro-futurist utopia that everyone wishes was real, and tech that would make Tony Stark go slack-jawed in disbelief.

“Because a lot of introduction to Chadwick Boseman’s King T’Challa was taken care of in Civil War (Good work MCU!), Ryan Coogler was able to take a man who we knew experienced great loss and throw him into a situation and watch how he handles it. We get to meet the rest of his family, and the rest of his people. A world which is wonderfully populated by fantastic women who are all fully fleshed out characters and have their own intentions. I could go on and on… Wakanda Forever.” —Matt Walker

Mute

Mute

★ “Just being silent and writing stuff down isn’t enough. In fact, what does it add to this film that he’s mute anyway? What does it add that he’s sort of Amish? Where does that go? Where does anything go in Mute? I’ll tell you where Mute’s going. To the forgotten bowels of Netflix where nobody has the patience to scroll down to.” —Steve G

★★★★★ “One of my most anticipated films of the year has finally arrived. The passion project. The spiritual successor to the phenomenal Moon. Duncan Jones’ return to the world of sci-fi. Or… so we believed…

“This is a polarizing film. There’s no doubt about that. Every criticism I’ve seen thus far isn’t unfair in the slightest. All have legitimate points. This is not a perfect film. This is not a simple film. This is absolutely an example of ‘feel-bad cinema’. Honestly, it’s ‘feel-dogshit cinema’. That’s not going to be for everyone. Yet, as I’ve come to watch more films as of late, I’m starting to love challenging films. I want films to take some expectations I had for them and shift them around. Not letting me down, but delivering something I wasn’t expecting at all… I love Mute. Warts and all, I love this film.” —Noah Thompson

Old School

Recent reviews of the classics
The Color Purple

The Color Purple

“People have pointed out for decades that this takes a pretty lavish approach to a novel that has a very simple, almost stark kind of narration. In my opinion, this works: book Celie is the kind of person who struggles to adequately explain herself or convey her feelings and experiences, but she feels deeply and finds a lot of meaning in her experiences. The tone and visuals of this film tie the viewer emotionally to those experiences, so that she is not explaining them so much as you are being encouraged to feel them along with her. Celie is such a fantastic character, and I think Whoopi Goldberg does her justice with a brilliant and nuanced performance.” —Chloe

High Noon

High Noon

“Classic archetype of a stoic, silent hero… and a stubborn and stupid one to boot (he should have listened to Grace Kelly’s character in the first five minutes, but then there’d be no movie). There are things I really don’t like about this showdown western—the soundtrack is good but used so bloody relentlessly, and despite the Oscar win I’m not a fan of Gary Cooper’s acting (he’s just a bit… grey). However, there’s a lot that I do like as High Noon metronomically chugs through its 85 minutes.” —Stu

The Lion in Winter

The Lion in Winter

“I really can’t remember the last time I enjoyed dialogue this much in a movie. Every single line, it seems, is so crisply written and venomous, and it’s just a ton of fun watching O’Toole and Hepburn (as well as the supporting cast) deliver them… This has got to be one of the most dysfunctional families in cinematic history, yet they are so much fun to watch and so much fun to root against. I think I rooted against them anyway. I don’t know. Maybe I did like them. With all the brilliant writing, by the way, I believe my favorite line is the very simple one spoken by son John that seems to come from a Monty Python movie—‘You stink. You’re a stinker and you stink!’ I might start saying that to my students.” —Shane Brashear

The Post

Recent Reviews of Oscar Nominees
A Fantastic Woman

A Fantastic Woman

“Sebastián Lelio’s film doesn’t delicately brush against trans issues; it collides with them at full, romantic force. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a work of art so baldly provocative on the subject, so willing to confront the audience not just with the abstract notion of dysphoria, but with its painful specificity—emotional and physical… Like Marina, the film is attentive to ugliness and beauty in equal measure, with stylistic flourishes and escapist fantasies sprinkled generously throughout.” —Stephen Miller

The Insult

The Insult

The Insult is a gripping Lebanese courtroom drama that starts out with an argument over a drainpipe and snowballs into riots in the streets nearing full on religious war… In the beginning I found myself switching sides pretty often, trying to figure out who I thought was in the right and by the end the film has done such a great job at getting you to empathize with both that you’re just glad it turns out the way it does. I need more court room dramas! Bring back the court room dramas!” —David A

Loveless

Loveless

“It’s hard to say you’re looking forward to seeing a new Andrey Zvyagintsev film, as you know you’re in for a whole lotta hopelessness and despair, yet like a moth to the flame, I’m drawn in yet again. Once again, Zvyagintsev delivers a masterpiece of gut-wrenching gloom. One of the qualities I marvel at is how he can can be both distant and close at the same time; observing characters dispassionately and also with great passion. It’s a unique quality, like his haunting cinematography, that I can’t quite put my finger on.” —Jonathan White

On Body and Soul

On Body and Soul

“Absolutely refreshing to see a love story that involved people who weren’t perfect tens! It is about time real people with real issues get some face time before the camera! Because in the real world nobody is perfect, we all carry baggage of some sort or another! My heart ached for this couple! As deeply stifled and awkward as they were I found it was easy to relate to their story for if you think about it love is messy business! No one within its grip remains unscathed!” —Naughty aka Juli Norwood

The Square

The Square

“Claes Bang gives one of the performances of the year as a museum curator whose personal life distracts him from his job and who gives the green light on a provocative ad campaign for a new installation that causes a public outrcy. But this is only a little bit of what the film as a whole is about. What it’s about more than anything is the fine line that separates us all from our savage instincts, no matter how civilized and cultivated we’d like to think we are.” —EvanstonDad

This Is The End

Coco

Nice idea for a list challenge here from Robin: nominating your favorite film within each of our genres.

3 Hati Dua Dunia Satu Cinta

We love this community for constantly introducing us to new genres. “Oh, we are aware that Elon Musk just successfully brought a car to space. Space is not heaven though. We, Indonesians, love heaven better.”

Only Yesterday

Which version of Letter from an Unknown Woman do you prefer?

Swiss Army Man

We love looking at you looking at each other.

The Godfather: Part II