Films

8.9Skry

There Will Be Blood

2007

Oil country California, early century: a self-made prospector named Daniel Plainview acquires land from locals who don't yet understand what they're sitting on, staging his young son as a prop for respectability while he works. The opposition is a local preacher, Eli Sunday, whose grip on the community proves harder to buy off than the acreage. Paul Thomas Anderson builds the film as a two-man contest stretched across decades, paced like a slow pressure system — long passages of near-silence against eruptions of operatic confrontation. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Plainview as a man whose contempt for other people has become indistinguishable from his drive, and the film's structural wager is that watching him accumulate and corrode is enough.

8.1Skry

John Wick

2014

The inciting event is almost absurdly small: a stolen car and a dead dog, a grief that belongs to a quieter kind of film. What Chad Stahelski and David Leitch build around it is something else — a revenge picture that treats its action as choreography in the strictest sense, staging each gunfight as a spatial problem to be solved with clean sightlines and consistent physics. Keanu Reeves plays a retired assassin dragged back into an underworld with its own economy, mythology, and rules of engagement, and the film spends real time on that infrastructure. The violence earns its geometry because the world holding it together is worked out in full.

Graphic Desires

2023