I didn't watch that many movies in the last three months. I'm hoping I'll have more to write about next time. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) Ellen Burstyn's Alice is the best performance in any of Martin Scorsese's films. Alice walks on a knife's edge, and Burstyn captures the extreme stress she experiences. But Burstyn simultaneously conveys the familial love and hope that Alice uses to power through the stress. The film is unpredictable. It lets us form expectations as the story heads off in one direction, then, there will be a sudden upheaval that sets it on a totally different course. Sometimes the tone is ironic, sometimes it's harrowing. And Burstyn's performance somehow works with all the different registers the film adopts. That said, the film turns out to have a sort of tragic repetitiveness, something for Alice's dreams and the film's more romantic devices to struggle against. The film isn...
"We are in the world, not against it." - Ursula K. Le Guin