Brian Toro

Films you can watch

November 24, 2025 at 04:53 AM

📌 Pinned

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

American Graffiti (1973)

Four Nights of a Dreamer (1977)

Decameron (1971)

Antoine and Collete (1962)

The Age of the Medici (1972 Socrates (1971)

The Mother and the Whore (1973)

Scenes from a Marriage (1974)

A Summer's Tale (1996)

Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969)

Love Meetings (1964)

Favorite Actors

May 8, 2026 at 12:45 AM

Dustin Hoffman

Thank you sir

Cinema

May 8, 2026 at 12:43 AM

Cinema

Love

Dios

Directors

May 6, 2026 at 04:13 PM

Jean-Luc Godard

Good Actors

May 6, 2026 at 04:11 PM

Burt Young

Francis Ford Coppola

April 28, 2026 at 08:46 PM

on the set of The Godfather II

George Lucas

April 28, 2026 at 08:42 PM

Lucas directing Robert Duval on the set of THX-1138

Carl Dryer: Day of Wrath (1943)

April 1, 2026 at 10:38 PM

Carl Dryer: Day of Wrath (1943)

Visible Speech

March 24, 2026 at 09:11 PM

"The soul is educated through seeing."

Aesthetics

Philosophy

Religion

Good actors

March 11, 2026 at 10:44 PM

Sydney Pollack

What makes Sydney Pollack great? When he enters a scene, he often seems to bring an entire institutional world with him: the law firm, the studio, the marriage, the old-boys’ network, the social order. That is a rare gift.

He specialized in a narrow but difficult range—cultivated authority, managerial menace, dry wit, bruised sophistication—and within that range he was extraordinarily precise. He understood how institutions speak through faces, posture, pauses, and tone. Very few actors make power look so natural, and even fewer make it look so tired.

Humanmade: Hollywood

March 10, 2026 at 09:48 PM

Hollywood

Deanna durbin

Faith on Film

March 7, 2026 at 07:49 PM

https://www.criterion.com/shop/collection/99-faith-on-film?srsltid=AfmBOordQyOx_YLNuOcONwB3nFeF95aA3u0kCmBK-ujaiT8QTwVm31SW

Un Esprit Libre (A Free Spirit),

March 1, 2026 at 11:57 PM

In his book, Un Esprit Libre (A Free Spirit), published in France in 1977, the year he died, Rossellini wrote of his belief that the cinema had reached a dead end. Instead he felt there was a pressing societal need for an education for the whole person in order to free people from the terrible dangers of specialization, which he saw as another form of ignorance. "We are neither ants, nor bees, nor spiders," he wrote, "and yet we have become regimented, stereotyped. . . ."^[4] He believed that education today has an effect of "fixing and maintaining" what is already established in a society. He also found ridiculous educational methods that fill brains with facts while suffocating all interest into the why's of life and the world."^[

Truffaut quote

February 18, 2026 at 07:09 PM

"I would give up all my films to have directed Les Enfants du Paradis", said director François Truffaut.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

February 18, 2026 at 07:05 PM

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) is hard to place in any single cinematic lineage because he treats film less as “storytelling” than as a way to think in images—often against the grain of the culture that finances and consumes movies. He was already a major poet/novelist when he began directing, and that literary formation shows up in almost everything: his casting, his use of dialect and “low” speech, his taste for allegory and myth, and his insistence that style is never neutral.

He is influential not because he offers a reusable “style,” but because he makes it hard to pretend cinema is merely entertainment. He treats film as a battleground where class, desire, religion, and language fight over what reality is allowed to look like. The cost is that some films can feel aggressively didactic, and his provocations—including sexual provocation—can seem less like exploration than like assault. That tension is inseparable from the work: he wants discomfort because he thinks comfort is politically purchased.

Love in the Afternoon (1972 film)

February 13, 2026 at 09:00 PM

Éric Rohmer

Bardo (Alejandro González Iñárritu)

February 12, 2026 at 11:24 PM

A director I like.

Great Films

January 28, 2026 at 08:51 PM

Little Big Man (1970) Dir. Arthur Penn

New Hollywood

Great Actors

January 26, 2026 at 08:21 PM

James Cagney occupies a peculiar position in American cinema. He is often remembered for velocity—rapid speech, sudden violence, restless movement—but that reputation obscures the deeper structure of his work. Cagney was not an actor of excess; he was an actor of compression. His performances operate by reduction rather than accumulation. What feels explosive is in fact tightly regulated.

Here's an exchange with Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg that concludes on the greatness of James Cagney

Steven Spielberg: "When we first met, which was 1980, he was just finishing the construction of his sets for The Shining. When it was all over and the movie was done, I saw Stanley again. I went to his house for dinner in London, and he asked me, 'How did you like my movie?'"

Steven Spielberg: "I’d only seen it once, and I didn't love The Shining the first time I saw it. I have since seen The Shining 25 times. It's one of my favorite pictures. Kubrick films tend to grow on you; you have to see them more than once. But the wild thing is, I defy you to name me one Kubrick film that you can turn off once you started. It's impossible. He's got this fail-safe button or something."

Steven Spielberg: "But I didn't like it the first time I saw it. I was telling him all the things I liked about it, and he saw right through me. He said, 'Well, Steven obviously didn't like my picture very much.'"

Steven Spielberg: "I said, 'Well, there's a lot of things I loved about it.' He says, 'Yeah, but there's a lot of things you didn't. Probably more you didn't than you did. So tell me what you didn't like about it.'"

Steven Spielberg: "And I said, 'Well, the thing that I thought... Jack Nicholson, who was a great actor, I thought it was a great performance, but it was almost a Great Kabuki performance. It's almost like Kabuki theater.'"

Stanley Kubrick: "You mean you think Jack went over the top?"

Steven Spielberg: "I said, 'Yeah, I kind of did.' And he said, 'Okay, quickly, without thinking, who are your top favorite actors of all time? I want you to just name off some names.'"

Steven Spielberg: "So I quickly went: Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Clark Gable. He stopped me. He said, 'Okay, where was James Cagney on that list?'"

Steven Spielberg: "I thought, well, he's up there high. I said, 'Ah, but he's not in the top five.' He said, 'You don't consider James Cagney one of the five best actors around? You see, I do. This is why Jack Nicholson's performance is a great one.'"

Great actors

January 21, 2026 at 08:35 PM

John Cazale (1935–1978) was an American character actor who holds one of the most remarkable records in cinematic history: every feature film he starred in was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Cazale’s style is restrained, reactive, morally tense, and psychologically precise. He specializes in characters who are structurally weaker than the worlds they inhabit—and he renders that weakness without apology or spectacle. That’s why his performances linger: they feel less like acting than like a person being slowly revealed under pressure.

Al Pacino said he was one of the greatest actors he had ever worked with.

Chinatown (1974)

January 11, 2026 at 08:29 PM

Chinatown (1974) Dir. Roman Polanski Jack Nicholson Faye Dunaway John Huston Cinema

Great directors

December 29, 2025 at 07:24 PM

Éric Rohmer (1920–2010) was a legendary French filmmaker and a founding figure of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). Born Maurice Schérer, he was an intensely private man who led a double life as a bourgeois teacher and family man while becoming a world-renowned director.

Éric Rohmer makes quiet, dialogue-driven films that treat conversation as moral action. His characters think and talk through desire rather than act on it, often using reason to justify weakness or delay. The style is naturalistic and restrained—few dramatic events, minimal technique—so that ethical tension emerges from time, hesitation, and self-explanation rather than plot or spectacle.

Great Actors

December 28, 2025 at 08:33 PM

Renate Reinsve

and Elle Fanning

Best film out now

December 28, 2025 at 08:30 PM

Great contemporary director.

Joachim Trier.

Renate Reinsve is great.

Great Actors

December 24, 2025 at 06:34 PM

Franco Citti

Franco Citti’s acting style was defined by a raw, unrefined naturalism that stemmed from his background as a non-professional actor. Discovered by Pier Paolo Pasolini while working as a day laborer, Citti became the quintessential "face" of Italian neorealism’s gritty underclass.

Critics frequently noted his "intense screen presence" and "truculent melancholy".

Children of Paradise (1945)

December 24, 2025 at 06:30 PM

Directed by Marcel Carné
Written by Jacques Prévert

Great Actors

December 22, 2025 at 04:52 AM

Jean-Pierre Leud

Léaud is known for a highly idiosyncratic acting style characterized by staccato diction, intense mannerisms, and a tendency toward improvisation.

My favorite actor.

Great Directors

December 20, 2025 at 12:59 AM

Roberto Rossellini

His work, characterized by its documentary-like authenticity and use of on-location shooting, revolutionized global cinema and deeply influenced the French New Wave.

My favorite director