I haven't seen a film in quite a long time that so bracingly invited me to think about it, one that I almost immediately wanted to read other writers' responses to. There are several reasons for this, some of them topical, of course. (And I agree that this is not a film about so-called cancel culture.) But it also struck me as a film that is willing to tackle serious, intellectual, adult...
2022-11-17 20:47:05 +0000 UTC View Post
The NYFF Currents regime doesn't have a lot of use for the old lions of the avant-garde. So it was surprising that an exception was made for Emigholz, whose work has changed a bit in recent years but has still retained a basic austerity. Well, wouldn't you know, he's gone and embraced the essay-film trend, adapting the techniques of his "Photography and Beyond" architecture documents so as to apply t...
2022-11-16 05:45:19 +0000 UTC View Post
When I first moved back to Houston after several years in Syracuse, Jen and I lived with my parents for a bit. And they watched the local news, something that I've never really been interested in. I distinctly remember one story on Houston's more sensationalist news program, 13 Eyewitness News, dealing with a series of sex workers who had been killed over the course of a month. ...
2022-11-16 04:59:39 +0000 UTC View Post
It hasn't gone unnoticed that a large number of short films included in this year's NYFF Currents selection came from the museum / gallery world, rather than the more traditional co-op filmmaking circles. This has a lot to do with funding, of course, since major art institutions are able to sustain a relatively thriving economy, while distributors of artists' films have fallen on hard times. Lawrence...
2022-11-09 04:51:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Causeway (Lily Neugebauer, 2022)
Considering the backlog of viewing I have at this point, there's really no excuse for having watched this. But as Jen correctly pointed out, "it's Paperboi!" As it happens, I am glad to have watched the exceedingly mediocre Causeway because Brian Tyree Henry's performance, while not enough to carry the picture, is certainly s...
2022-11-07 23:48:07 +0000 UTC View Post
I get the sense that maybe Jordan Peele would like to work outside of the confines of genre, but his backers won't allow it. I say this in part because the first 20-30 minutes of Nope is a rather tedious "slow cinema" prologue, the sort we often find in M. Night Shyamalan films, although Shyamalan does it better. The main problem with Nope as I see it is that it feels less like a co...
2022-11-05 02:38:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Corsage is eminently watchable, but the fact it's being considered one of the year's major achievements is frankly mind-boggling.
As others have already mentioned, Corsage seems to owe quite a lot to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette which, like it or not, was a very innovative approach to the historical biopic. I personally liked Marie Antoinette, ...
2022-11-04 02:56:11 +0000 UTC View Post
A film does not have to make sense in order to be compelling. However, it's good if there's a compelling reason not to make sense. The late films of Alexei German are a good example. Whether he was trying to convey the labyrinthine paranoia of the Soviet inner circle (Khroustaliov, My Car!) or the Breughel-like depravity of a revivified Middle Ages (Hard to...
2022-10-29 00:49:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi there!
Although it probably isn't necessary, I did want to post a quick note to address the fact that I have been rather distracted from cinema. In addition to teaching five online classes this term -- man, Covid really broke this generation, college is a total shitshow now -- Jen and I have been struggling for, no lie, ten weeks trying to get a working HVAC system installed. I won't bore yo...
2022-10-28 04:50:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Disclosure of personal connections is always an odd thing when it comes to writing about experimental film. It is a small coterie, and I probably have some personal connection with about 80% of the avant-garde filmmakers I write about. But it does seem worth noting that one of the makers of A Woman Escapes, Blake Williams, is a good friend, and that I'm on nodding terms with the other two. W...
2022-10-25 03:29:42 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been an odd year for Claire Denis. Her film from Berlin, Both Sides of the Blade, was a French star vehicle in the lineage of Chabrol, weighted down by a seriousness that neither of its formidable leads, Vincent Lindon or Juliette Binoche, could convincingly pull off. Where that film displayed histrionics within an essentially realist shell, Denis' English-language effort Stars at N...
2022-10-22 04:21:59 +0000 UTC View Post
The English title of this film is Nobody's Hero, while the French title, Viens je t'emmène, roughly translates as "Come on, I'll take you there." Very different titles, perhaps linked by an idea of leadership, that someone, someone specific, knows the way things should be and how to make it so. It's possible, given the critical drubbing Guiraudie's film has received since its premi...
2022-10-19 02:26:37 +0000 UTC View Post
I appear to be in a distinct minority where this film is concerned. Many reviews describe it as evocative, poetic, emotionally resonant. And I see why some folks would feel that way. Aftersun is mostly notable for all the usual things that Charlotte Wells doesn't do. A memory piece about an adult woman's experience of a vacation in Turkey with her father, Aftersun implies a great ma...
2022-10-15 18:11:39 +0000 UTC View Post
During a Q&A in Houston, Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro was asked why he was making so many films based on Shakespearean texts. His answer was fairly simple: "I don't like starting from nothing." So, like a collage artist, he found a way to avoid the intimidating emptiness of a blank canvas. I thought about this while watching Human Flowers of Flesh, the strange and evocative new ...
2022-10-14 01:45:47 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the few remaining vestiges of the old Movie Nerd Discussion Group I used to belong to -- a Yahoo! Group, so yeah, do the math -- is a private site called Crix Pix, where about 20 to 25 of us still log general ratings for new releases, using a format adapted from old-school Variety. We have five categories: PRO, pro, mixed, con, and CON. Hardly a precision tool, but it does offer a handy at-a-g...
2022-10-10 04:21:42 +0000 UTC View Post
A breezy comedy with snappy dialogue? In this economy? Obviously Paramount thought no, unceremoniously dumping Confess, Fletch into theaters and VOD with nary a promotional peep. I could go on and on decrying this decision and what it tells us about the State of Movies Today. ("So yeah, this Fletch guy....could he maybe wear a cape?") But this would just lead t...
2022-10-05 20:43:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Mary Helena Clark has consistently been one of the most compelling avant-garde filmmakers on the current scene. A large part of the success of her films -- particularly Orpheus (Outtakes) (2012), The Glass Note (2018), and Figure Minus Fact (2020) -- owes to her vaguely surreal poetic sensibility. Rather than organizing her work around specific themes or even vis...
2022-10-01 03:36:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Here are the basic deets, per my Viennale catalogue entry:
"In their second collaboration, Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji offer a complex, heartrending portrait of a young Chinese woman searching for love and identity in a time when everything can and will be bought and sold. Lynn (Honggui Yao) is a 20-year-old college student. But she is caught between her boyfriend Zhang (Long Liu) and her parents...
2022-09-30 02:38:09 +0000 UTC View Post
It's interesting that right now, George Miller and Baz Luhrmann are the two preeminent Australian directors on the scene, because they both have highly specific aesthetics that, looked at in a certain light, can be allegories for problems of Australian white / settler culture in the 21st century. Where Luhrmann tries to divert attention from such difficult matters with a universalized form of r...
2022-09-25 03:38:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's my Viennale catalogue description:
Jónas Trueba follows his monumental study of Spanish youth, 2021’s Who’s Stopping Us, with an unexpectedly light seriocomic miniature focusing on a very different but equally specific period in life. Friends who have fallen out of touch with each other meet up at a Chano Domínguez concert in Madrid. After the show, Guillermo (Francesco Ca...
2022-09-22 17:29:13 +0000 UTC View Post
If saying it in the street is a knockout, is publishing it in Cinema Scope Online a cop-out? The rant is here.
2022-09-17 22:45:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Movement creates instability. This is a basic tenet of cinema, and it's true no matter how elegantly that movement is orchestrated. A still image allows us to grasp it fully, to see how its parts interact and form a coherent whole. Once the image starts moving, it becomes impossible to ever really see that whole, not just because it's changing, but because movement inevitably pulls our focus away fro...
2022-09-17 04:47:17 +0000 UTC View Post
And lest it get lost in the TIFFing shuffle, here's my report on Crossroads 2022. Not quite as comprehensive as in years past, but then I'm afraid I found much less to like than in previous editions. 2022 is rough, folks.
2022-09-16 04:02:34 +0000 UTC View Post
In addition to firing off angry film critiques to the editor of your favo(u)rite Canadian magazine, I'm also doing a few longer pieces for InReview Online. Here come those links!
Dry Ground Burning (Adirley Quierós and Joana Pimenta, Wavelengths)
"Think about it: in Europe and N...
2022-09-16 03:58:35 +0000 UTC View Post
TIFF WAVELENGTHS 2022
Mazzolo is one of the most intellectually provocative filmmakers currently working in Argentina, a nation with a proud and significant history when it comes to avant-garde film. This history is often eclipsed by that country's fruitful new wave of narrative cinema. But there are significant parallels. (If you like Lucrecia Martel and Lisando Alonso, maybe ...
2022-09-08 18:24:50 +0000 UTC View Post
TIFF WAVELENGTHS 2022
In recent years, the great British avant-documentarian Ben Rivers has been making a considerable amount of collaborative work. Always intent on learning more about the scenes in front of his lens, Rivers turns to other artists to help him grapple with what he may not know. After joining forces with filmmakers such as Ben Russel and Anocha Suwichakornpong, ...
2022-09-08 17:17:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Once again, I am not attending. While this has mostly to do with discomfort with the prospect of getting Covid in what could possibly becomes a super-spreader event, it's also not the most tantalizing line-up they've ever assembled. To be fair, 2022 has been a pretty bunk year for cinema, likely owing to the pre-Covid cache of major projects having petered out.
Anyway I am once again writ...
2022-09-07 03:46:42 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a Bresson film that doesn't get as much play as it should, mostly because it hasn't been restored yet. (Word is, it's coming soon.) But even while watching it, I wavered. Is this major or minor Bresson? Judgments like that don't mean a lot, but what I was really trying to put my finger on was, is this a rote application of the director's bag of tricks, or was he perhaps expanding the language here?<...
In addition to watching and writing reviews for the various fall festivals (TIFF, NYFF, Crossroads), this is also the time of year when I start scouting films for my November program at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival. And as I'm sure many of you know, switching between those two hats -- critic and programmer -- can be tricky even in the best of times.
But yesterday I received an em...
2022-08-30 18:12:36 +0000 UTC View Post