Digitized Analog Letterboxd Monthly: April 2025
Handwritten notes about 19 movies - 16 with drawings! - that I watched in April.
You’re all extremely likely to be caught up with the last few months of Digitized Analog Letterboxd Monthly, but just as a reminder: I keep a magical movie journal where I note certain production/viewing details, lightly hash out thoughts/feelings, and try to add a little doodle/drawing when the mood strikes me.
In DALM, I share my favorite pages (by my own personal metric) at the end of each month, and so a polite warning: There may be spoilers ahead. To minimize that possibility, below is the list of movies featured. If you give any fraction of a crap about any of them, then proceed with any amount of caution as you see fit from here on out. (If you can read my handwriting, great! And if you already follow me on Letterboxd, well then also great!)
The Movies
A Different Man (2024)
A Field In England (2013)
Drop (2025)
April Fool’s Day (1986)
A Nice Indian Boy (2024)
Warfare (2025)
Anchoress (1993)
Mad Foxes (1981)
Penda’s Fen (1974)
The Pledge (1982)
The Sermon (2018)
Robin Redbreast (1970)
The Wedding Banquet (2025)
The Brutalist (2024)
Sinners (2025)
The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
The Order (2024)
The Muppet Movie (1979)
One of Them Days (2025)
A Different Man, A Field In England
Additional commentary:
A Different Man is truly a great movie that most people should probably watch, and that’s Adam Pearson, not Sebastian Stan’s character, that I drew.
A Field In England is not a great movie that most people should probably avoid, but for a very particular person it might be worth their time and attention. At the exact moment that I was watching this movie, I was not that particular person.
Drop, April Fool’s Day
Additional commentary:
Drop wasn’t great, but I really enjoyed April Fool’s Day and I knew that I wanted to draw something for it, I just wasn’t sure what. I’m not particularly pleased with what I did - the retractable knife looks strikingly like a handheld… personal massage… wand device… and this isn’t the best human being I’ve ever drawn either. I guess I thought that it’s important to share bad drawings from time to time to acknowledge that they exist and that I’m not actually as great as you think I am.
A Nice Indian Boy, Warfare
Additional commentary:
I skeeted (Bluesky tweet > ‘sky tweet > skeet) that “Sometimes it's not until I start doing something that I'm fully able to figure out just how much I don't want to be doing something.” That’s kinda what happened when I started drawing the family portrait from A Nice Indian Boy; I realized that I actually didn’t feel like drawing five distinct faces - or even a single Ganesh - and so I kinda just phoned it in. Sorry, Ganesh!
I really liked the fly-on-the-wall style of film that is Warfare, but can completely understand why some folks won’t.
Anchoress, Mad Foxes
Additional commentary:
Anchoress is such a beautiful film, and while it’s not quite like Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), it left me under an almost equal enchantment. It’s far more deserving of a better drawing than what I gave it, but I didn’t leave myself much space (not on purpose!) for the grandeur that it deserves. Perhaps on a rewatch, which is certain to happen, and sooner rather than later.
There really isn’t an easy way to describe Mad Foxes. It’s 80 minutes long but about 2 of those minutes near the beginning is a dance scene at a club that doesn’t even involve any of the main characters (pretty good dancing, though!). And yes, I absolutely did write “? Piss bath?” in my notes.
I’m telling you, it’s indescribable. A lot of fun!
Penda’s Fen, The Pledge, The Sermon, Robin Redbreast
Formatting notes:
I mentioned in February’s post that “…as much as I hated wasting space, I really disliked cramming up the space even more. This was the last time I tried to not waste as much space when I wasn’t drawing anything.” I think that now that I’m not boxing everything off so harshly, I’m able to include multiple movies on one page when there’s not much to note or draw about them and it isn’t obnoxious to look at, so here we are: a pretty clean looking 4 on 2.
Additional commentary:
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but a few months ago, I bought and started going through a boxset of folk horror films put out by Severin Films called All the Haunts Be Ours (you may have noticed that I’ve written “All the Haunts” in some entries; this is what that indicates). It took me a few months to go through all the films, shorts, docs and video essays, but I watched the final movie, Robin Redbreast, on April 18, and I absolutely loved it (free to watch on YouTube if you have 76 minutes to fill). While I thoroughly enjoyed going through the whole set (even though not everything was a winner), I was immediately filled with sadness, like now what am I supposed to do with my life.
Luckily, there is a Vol. 2, and I will get it as soon as I am able, but until then I’ll just keep on living with this gap in my heart.
The Wedding Banquet, The Brutalist, Sinners
Additional commentary:
I wish that I’d given myself more room to draw one of my favorite exchanges from The Brutalist, but I didn’t feel like drawing anything from The Wedding Banquet and I didn’t feel like wasting space. I also felt like, since I’ve already seen The Brutalist, it didn’t require more space than half a page, but once I started drawing I realized that I actually did need more room. C’est la vie.
Sinners… What a movie! And I’m so glad that my wife and I saw it in IMAX (Sinners director, Ryan Coogler, gives a heartwarming breakdown of the different film formats here, if you have any interest an 11 minutes to spare). Overall, I’m pretty pleased with this drawing, but there’s a flaw that I won’t point out. (I will. It’s the size of Smoke’s and Stack’s (Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan) heads. Now that I see it I can’t unsee it; I should’ve made them just a liiiiitle bit bigger.) C’est la vie.
The Ugly Stepsister, The Order
Additional commentary:
The Ugly Stepsister is the classic Cinderella fairytale as told by gleefully showing squeamishly horrific body… things… happening.
Jude Law has really aged gracefully into himself and there were moments in The Order when I felt like he looked rather like Gene Hackman (RIP). The movie is pretty good, too! Anyway, after drawing him firing a shotgun, I decided that it looks a little chibi or Precious Moments-y and now it kinda makes me wish there was a little porcelain figure of Jude Law like this.
The Muppet Movie, One of Them Days
Additional commentary:
Do you even have a heart or a soul if you don’t like the Muppets?
One of Them Days is really a story about two friends/roommates (Keke Palmer and SZA) having a day, and I thought about drawing the poster image of them on a street-side couch, but the Church’s Chicken Drive-Thru Thief thing stuck with me the most - days later I’m still chuckling to myself about it! - so how could I not draw that?!
Before the month was out, my good friend Jesse and I watched the Burt Reynolds vehicle (heh) White Lightning (1973), which was pretty good (I give it 3.5 stars), and I saw the latest from David Cronenberg, The Shrouds (2024), which I’m still digesting (but I’m giving it 4 stars); I’ve drawn nothing for either.
Current Mood: Tired.
Listening to: MUNYA - Un Deux Trois