Editor

Leslie Jones

5: briefs
13:00: average
65 min: in total

On film.briefs5

20th Century Women

Mike Mills · 2016

Set in 1979 Santa Barbara, Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women follows 15-year-old Jamie as his single mother Dorothea enlists two younger women — photographer Abbie and teenage friend Julie — to help raise him. Anchored by Annette Bening’s restrained performance, the film observes their overlapping lives with warmth and precision, treating feminism, illness, ageing and adolescence as lived conditions rather than themes. Shot by Sean Porter and edited by Leslie Jones, it moves at the pace of real conversation, building meaning through accumulation rather than climax.

13:00

Punch-Drunk Love

Paul Thomas Anderson · 2002

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 film stars Adam Sandler as Barry Egan, a socially anxious novelty-plunger entrepreneur in Los Angeles whose life fractures and reforms around an unexpected romance with Emily Watson’s Lena. Shot in 95 tightly controlled minutes, it uses Jon Brion’s dissonant score, Jeremy Blake’s abstract interludes, and a meticulously restrained performance from Sandler to explore loneliness, familial pressure, and love as destabilising force — not resolution.

13:00

The Thin Red Line

Terrence Malick · 1998

Terrence Malick’s 1998 return to filmmaking is a philosophical war film set during the Guadalcanal campaign. Eschewing narrative drive and military exposition, it lingers on interior states, natural imagery and fragmented voiceover to ask what war does to consciousness. Shot by John Toll in Queensland and the Solomon Islands, edited to a meditative rhythm and scored by Hans Zimmer, it features a large ensemble cast led by Jim Caviezel and Sean Penn. Though nominated for seven Academy Awards and awarded the Golden Bear, its resistance to convention divides viewers.

13:00

Inherent Vice

Paul Thomas Anderson · 2014

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014) adapts Thomas Pynchon’s labyrinthine 2009 novel into a sun-bleached, jazz-scored neo-noir set in 1970 Los Angeles. Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc Sportello, a stoner PI drawn into overlapping conspiracies involving real estate, organised crime, and institutional rot. Anchored by Phoenix’s understated performance and Robert Elswit’s hazy cinematography, the film favours mood and texture over narrative resolution — a deliberate, affectionate surrender to ambiguity.

13:00

The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson · 2012

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 drama follows Freddie Quell, a volatile WWII veteran, as he falls under the influence of Lancaster Dodd, leader of a fledgling philosophical movement. Shot almost entirely on 65 mm film, it relies on Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s physically precise performances, Jonny Greenwood’s jagged score, and a structure that favours ambiguity over exposition. Set in 1945–46, it explores post-war dislocation, the seduction of certainty, and the limits of personal transformation — without offering diagnosis, satire or resolution.