Heat (1995)

I am alone, I am not lonely, says Robert DeNiro's character around the thirty-minute mark. Thirty minutes out of a hundred and seventy and I already knew I would love Michael Mann's Heat, an astonishing crime masterpiece. 

Vox Lux (2018)

I remember seeing the trailer to Vox Lux on TV after it premiered at Venice last September and you know what stuck with me? Natalie Portman's Black Swan-alike makeup. Despite the film's forgettability and my lack of interest in seeing it, I still checked it out because of my love for Portman. 

The film follows 18 years in the life of Celeste Montgomery (Natalie Portman as an adult, and Raffrey Cassidy as a teen). After surviving a school shooting in 1999, she is catapulted into stardom thanks to the writing skills of her sister, Ellie (Stacy Martin), and her passionate manager (Jude Law).

Hotel Chevalier (2007)

Months ago, I watched Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited for the first time and, as I was expecting, I loved it. Thanks to Steven from Surrender to the Void I learnt about Hotel Chevalier, a short film prologue to The Darjeeling Limited. 

In this short, Jack (Jason Schwartzman), one of the Whitman brothers, is lying on a bed, wearing a robe and ordering from room service. His peace is disrupted when he gets a call from his ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) who informs him she'll be there in 30 minutes. He tides the room, draws a bath, changes his clothes and puts on Peter Sarstedt's Where Do You Go to My Lovely.

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

There's still plenty of time since Isle of Dogs hits theatres here (May 17 unless they decide to postpone it for some dumb reason) so I decided to take advantage of this time to watch the Wes Anderson movies I haven't seen yet. The Darjeeling Limited was one of them and it was also the one that had been on my watchlist for at least 10 years (I added to my list because of Natalie Portman but I'm so glad that at the end I didn't watch the movie for her because it would have been a major disappointment since she's barely in the movie). 

A year after the accidental death of their father, three brothers, Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), meet on a train, the Darjeeling Limited, and embark on a journey across India in an attempt to bond with each other. But Francis has something else in mind, visiting their mother (Anjelica Huston) who didn't even show up at their father's funeral. 

Annihilation (2018)

Though I didn't really like Alex Garland's Ex Machina (but I'm planning on giving it another chance), I was really excited about his latest film, Annihilation, and really pissed off that everybody outside of the US got to see this on Netflix instead of cinemas. It has an upside though, no money wasted if the movie sucked, but that was not the case. 

A year after his disappearance, Kane (Oscar Isaac) goes back home to his biologist wife Lena (Natalie Portman) but he doesn't remember where he's been and how he got home. He suddenly gets sick and is rushed to a hospital. Once there, in order to help Kane, Lena joins a team made up of an anthropologist (Tuva Novotny), a physicist (Tessa Thompson), a psychologist (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and a paramedic (Gina Rodriguez) and embark on an expedition into the Shimmer, a mysterious electromagnetic field.