taylor-russell

The splash of bright colors of the almost-untouched-by-film-in-1959 Brazil frames Black Orpheus as nothing short of a visual marvel. There is a fable-like element to Black Orpheus. The film centers on a pair of star-crossed lovers who fight against various obstacles to be in each other’s embrace, and this mysterious pull feels conjured from past iterations of a life together. I watch this film every summer because although it has a tragic love-lost feeling, it is simultaneously infused with joy, celebration and reverberating sound. It’s impossible to watch and not ache to be transported to magical Rio and run around in every shade of green that exists.

This is the first film of Ozu’s that I had the pleasure of seeing. Good Morning is a seemingly simple portrait of a family, in which you feel the pain of generational differences and the very real need, as a child, to have the things you desire and what you will do in order to get them. There are many moments throughout Good Morning that feel precious for their extraction of truth from everyday life. 

I first saw Persona on a friend’s recommendation while I was shooting a film I did a few years ago called Waves. The most recent time I saw Persona, I was in London watching a Bergman retrospective, and Liv Ullmann introduced the film. She talked about how the relationship between Bergman, Bibi Andersson and her was one of pure friendship and affection. She was friends with Andersson before meeting Bergman, and he crafted the story around his impression of them. Persona is expert in catching the subtle complexities of a female friendship, vulnerability, betrayal and ultimately understanding yourself in the mirror of another. 

It's impossible to fully comprehend the way Chantal Akerman alchemized the slow burn of the unwinding of a mother over a few days in her life. This film completely swept me away from the moment it began. I could watch Delphine Seyrig do just about anything—as she so carefully and madly does here. It's a beautiful portrait that left me feeling empathic to the invisible storylines around me. 

Of the multiple collaborations between John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Gloria rises to the top of my list. A unique and touching unlikely love story, you could call it, between Rowlands’s Gloria and the brilliant young John Adames as Phil. Rowlands really shines here as a mobster's ex-mistress, tough and reluctant to take on her protector role, but she does so with more heart than anyone else I could imagine. It’s inspiring to think that Rowlands was able to craft fully realized and embodied multifaceted characters in a time when that wasn’t exactly happening. I admire many, many aspects of Gloria, but the courage and heart make it a must-see. 

This is a wonderfully messy, glowing, unabashed journey of a girl on the edge. There is something about a road film, something about the harshness and freedom of feeling like the wind could take you anywhere it chooses. I admire the ever-changing and evolving palette reflected in Agnès Varda’s work. I also love her documentary Black Panthers, filmed in Oakland during the protests, which captured the likes of Huey P. Newton and Kathleen Cleaver. You can see in all Varda’s films that she is constantly reflecting on the environment around her, and the impact it has on her work is masterful. There is a beautiful and unique blend of activism and art all at once.

I have never been as excited and headfirst ready to dive into the multiple waves of anxiety as I have when rewatching Punch-Drunk Love time after time. Somehow each watch feels like the first—endlessly tender, perfectly sincere and wholly original. Every single performance cycles in your brain for days after watching. The color blue. The scene in the restaurant with Adam Sandler and Emily Watson. The soundtrack! And unforgettable dialogue such as “I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.” 

I Am Love is the first film I discovered of Luca’s, a long time before we met and worked together. I remember watching it on a laptop in my friend’s car on a ferryboat. We were so completely taken by it. I remember us both gasping and looking wide-eyed at each other, wordlessly saying, “How is this possible?” The intimacy, shame and forbidden love paired with an intoxicating landscape—all with the singular fingerprint of Luca Guadagnino—makes I Am Love one of the greatest films about romance of all time.

This is a beautiful, visceral, toxic love story by the French-Algerian director Maïwenn. The film is like a punch and then it all falls down: You see how love dissolves and falls apart. While you’re watching it, you wonder why we put ourselves in these situations that are so painful and dig deeper into them instead of getting out. You make a commitment to somebody, getting married or having a baby, and then you’re bound with them for such a long time. Somebody who ends up perhaps causing you so much pain, like in this film. 

You see the story through the lens of Tony going through physical rehabilitation, which is tied to her past emotionally. It’s a smart assessment of how our physical embodiment is always linked to something mental, or something from the past that hasn’t been resolved yet. So it’s beautiful and heartbreaking and I admire Maïwenn as a director. She is just very in tune and emotionally aware. It’s a film that I recommend to people—if you want a crazy, sexy, heartbreaking love story that’s very tasteful and French, then watch this one.

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I have been a huge fan of Weerasethakul since his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I would say that this is my favorite film of his. I saw Memoria in a theater—very luckily, as the score is the most exceptional experience I’ve had in a cinema. I felt as though I was in a sort of cathedral while watching it, and at the same time this sweeping calm washed over me, like a meditation. Weerasethakul has one of the most unique ways of eliciting an old precious feeling, buried sometimes very deep. I haven’t stopped thinking about Memoria for a couple years now, and I don’t know if I ever will. You will leave better off from experiencing this gift of a film.