Beaches of Agnes movie review

   Beaches of Agnes is a documentary about French filmmaker Agnes Varda and her life growing up in France. Varda uses a wide variety of techniques, combining still images of people, including her past friends, collaborators, lovers and family, with what Claude Lévi-Strauss might term bricolage of garage-sale items, trinkets, and colorful memorabilia juxtaposed in creative combinations, and combines beautiful images in a collage format which revolves around the theme of beaches. In the opening shots, she has assistants film her bringing mirrors to a beach in Belgium which she used to visit as a young girl; one mirror is on the sand as a wave washes over it. She captures a creative French artistic sensibility with a sincere and playful appreciation for the beauty of film and art. Many of the images appear to be like old impressionist era paintings. Varda used clips from her own films and used them to convey her style. She uses people to re-inact various events from her child-hood in a lot of the sequences.

  The look of the documentary was very surreal and avant garde. I give credit to whomever composed the beautiful images of this movie. It was very informative yet very artistic. Overall I give this movie a grade of -A.

Wolf of Wall Street review

    The Wolf of Wallstreet is a heavily star-studded feature with an ensemble cast of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Mathew McConaughey, and Jean Dujardin. Set in 1987, Leo's character Jordan Belfort takes the job of a stock broker at a Wallstreet firm with Matt's character Mark as his boss. Already this movie is set up to be a movie with great performances. Anyway Mark encourages Jordan to lead his company into a steady lifestyle of casual sex with the colleagues and cocaine use. As the movie goes on Jordan meets a whole line of other businessmen who invest in pure corruption, only stealing money for themselves. The graphic nature of drug use and sex in this movie led me to actually think what was going through these actors minds during the making of this film. In some scenes the actors looked as if they were really getting  high and doing crack. This gave the movie a very Scorcesesque kind of edge very similar to some of his past movies like "Goodfellas". In fact this movie felt like a nod to that movie with themes like corrupted men, drugs, scandal, tipping off the police, and old fashioned housewife abuse. Going into this movie I felt like I filled up the whole theatre getting the nods and little gimmicks of Scorceses' past movies, being a film buff really made me stand out in the whole audience laughing.

  Overall this movie was highly entertaining and true to its directorial style. It was entirely shot in digital format making the picture nice and sparkling clear truly capturing the grand performances of the actors. Alot of people would be put off by the gratuitous sex and drug use in the movie but I consider that the beauty of Scorcese's film. I give this movie a grade: A.