Parts and sums ^⁠41%

7/16/2026, 9:40:08 AM

Keywords: Manhunter, Excalibur, The Fly, Nuestra Tierra, Looney Tunes, Michael Mann, John Boorman, David Cronenberg, Lucrecia Martel, Film, Movie Reviews

BS Summary: This article contains 18 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Appeal to Emotion, and Appeal to Authority, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 15.4% saturation with 94 hits. Analysis detected 690 faulty-reasoning hits from 609 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 39.7% and a BS Rank of ⁠41% (15,822 of 26,791 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 59.10% of the article peer group.

Confidence50%

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609 words

Movies are the sum of their parts, but those parts are also the sum of themselves.

As my cinephilia continues to evolve, I find myself focusing on different things about the films I see.

Sometimes it’s the filmmaker, sometimes the history, less often the story, but that can be important in some instances.

This past week, I found myself focusing on even smaller details, both in films I had and hadn’t seen before.

Most satisfying in this regard was the final cut of Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), a new 4K restoration of which screened at the Music Box Theatre.

What intrigued me upon this viewing was the costumery and set design, specifically as they apply to the serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde (played by the recently deceased Tom Noonan), who lives in an apartment decked out in space posters—somehow tastefully—and wears cool patterned shirts.

Mann's films are full of snazzy details like these, aglow with the grime of humanity but also with its faintest traces, the ones that most literally illuminate a person's being, even as the films dredge the darkest depths.

Speaking of “aglow,” that’s more literally manifested in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), which I saw at the Alamo Drafthouse.

Based on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, the original compilation of Arthurian legends, the film is as beautiful as it is bizarre.

Appropriate to the nature of its material, the very stuff of legend, much of the film appears to glow.

I found myself aligned with Pauline Kael’s assessment; not being overly familiar with the film before seeing it, I’ve relied on her to help process it.

As she wrote in her New Yorker review about Excalibur’s ethereal mise-en-scène, “The imagery is impassioned, and it has a hypnotic quality.

You feel that there's something going on under the narrative; you're very much aware of shine and glitter, of hair and skin—the imagery has a tactile life of its own.”

The same about tactility could be said of David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), though in a much more gruesome manner.

It screened at the Siskel Film Center as part of Mubi Fest.

I'd last seen it as a child and think I may have blocked out how disturbing it was—and still is, almost shockingly so.

This is less peripheral than the other examples of details by which I was entranced this past week, and significant for that reason.

Normally, gore from films almost 40 years old wouldn't shock me, as it's typically stylized and not as realistic as in today’s horror movies.

Somehow, even though the gore announces its own artifice—Seth's boil-laden skin looks like an exceptionally scary Halloween mask one might purchase today—it's still profoundly sickening.

Lastly, upon seeing Lucrecia Martel's documentary Nuestra Tierra (2025) at Facets, I was struck by her use of drone shots to depict the Argentine land at the center of the struggle between the Indigenous Chuschagasta community and non-Indigenous speculators trying to force them off it.

The drone shots capture the breadth of the terrain, the device also acting as an evenhanded interloper, observing the conflict (both the land dispute and a murder trial) in the coyly distanced way characteristic of Martel's style.

In addition to the above, though not related in a specific way, I also went to watch Looney Tunes cartoons at the Music Box; the theatre screens them annually in conjunction with the Southport Art Fest.

I look forward to it every year—the experience is almost painfully wholesome, with families bringing their kids to laugh at the same characters we’ve all been laughing at for the past several decades.

And that’s all, folks.

I mean—until next time, moviegoers.

609 words analyzed.

Speakers

1speaker3.6%attributed speech587writer words

22 attributed words100% of attributed speech63% writer coverage

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

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Analysis

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Parts and sums ^⁠41%

Speakers

Paulin(e) Kael

Analysis

Biases

Fallacies

Manipulations

Parts and sums ⁠41%

Speakers

Paulin(e) Kael

Analysis

Biases

Fallacies

Manipulations

Parts and sums ^⁠41%