Unfortunately I popped a Benadryl (my allergies are really awful these days) just before seeing Pedro Costa’s exquisite Colossal Youth, which was the movie I was most excited to see during the SF Film Festival. Not good, because Costa stretches his long takes to the absolute breaking point (though I probably only drifted off for only a few seconds each time). Hey, at least I happily stayed through the whole thing; people were leaving in droves!

(I didn’t “get it,” though I stopped having that reaction to a film a long time ago.) What was certainly most memorable was the rigorously composed frame, mostly with the tall, dazed lead character - Costa gets a lot of mileage from dressing him in all black - cutting obliquely across the screen. What a movie though: ghosts refusing to quit haunting burnt-out shells of buildings, shuffling in stained and chipped hallways, reciting letters never sent, standing in ruined pools of light.